Psychotherapeutic hospital treatment is a traditionally important intervention in German speaking countries. Nonetheless, systematic evidence of its effectiveness is lacking. The present meta-analysis aims to integrate results of all available published and unpublished studies. 103 studies could be identified by electronic database search and handsearch. Effect sizes were calculated for different outcome domains (somatic, mental, cognitive, social, functional, economic, and general condition). Meta-analysis reveals medium to large effects for psychotherapeutic hospital treatment (overall outcome pre-post: g=0.71; 95% CI 0.65-0.76) with slight increase to follow-up (g=0.80; 95% CI 0.69-0.90). Due to heterogeneity of patients, interventions, outcome measures, and study quality, the aggregated effect sizes show a great variance.
