Objectives:
Most research studies conducted among psychotherapists concern (1) thefrequency of use of specific methods of work and (2) the categories of patients using the therapy. They have examined the relations between these two groups of variables to a lesser extent. Theprimary objective of this study was to determine what is the practice of Polish therapists in combining methods of working with diverse diagnoses of patients.

Methods:
The study involved 1,838 therapists who declared that they conducted psychotherapy in Poland (80% women and 20% men). The subjects filled out, mostly via the Internet, a questionnaire consisting of questions whose scope related mainly to psychotherapeutic activities and preparation for its implementation. We used two groups of information from the survey: (1) the working methods used by the psychotherapists and (2) the categories of patients undergoing psychotherapy – extracted by types of reported problems and diagnoses.

Results:
The research results revealed that three groups/classes of therapists can be extracted in Poland according to the way in which the therapists combine the working methods of psychotherapy with the categories of patients. It can be stated that a larger number of working methods used by the therapists is associated with how psychotherapy is conducted among different categories of patients.

Conclusions:
Polish psychotherapists: (1) use a large number of possible combinations of therapeutic methods; (2) can be described by belonging to one of three groups distinguished by the way they combine therapeuticmethods with the categories of patients they work with.