Talk Therapy Overstated: Psychotherapy Benefits For Depression Treatment

While that’s not a wrong assumption, a new Plos One study suggests that the effectiveness of psychological therapies is significantly exaggerated by published research that compares different kinds of treatments.

A somewhat alarming new study says that the benefits of talk therapy with depression patients may have been grossly overstated.

“This doesn’t mean that psychotherapy doesn’t work”, said Steven Hollon, one of the authors of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, in a released statement. And that scientific literature may be partly to blame, the Times notes.

They contacted the researchers who had conducted the 13 unpublished studies and requested the results from their studies. “It’s like flipping a bunch of coins and only keeping the ones that come up heads”, Hollon said.

Cognitive behaviour therapy- is a type of psychotherapy – created to treat depression and mental illnesses – helps patients understand the feelings and thoughts that influence behaviour or who is dealing with anxiety and depression. The study stated that both talk therapy and cognitive behavior therapy are efficacious, but not as efficacious as it was believed. This study, while won’t settle the debate around psychology’s relative merits, will go a long way to providing guidelines for more effective depression treatment.

Specialists said that there are 20% expanded shots of change in the wake of taking part in a course of very much tried psychotherapy.

After analyzing the unpublished and published data together, Hollon and his colleagues concluded that the effectiveness of psychotherapy for the treatment of depression was about 25 percent lower than suggested in the published data alone.

To assess the extent of study publication bias in trials evaluating efficacy of psychological treatment for depression, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of NIH grants awarded to randomized clinical trials between 1972 and 2008. Out of 55 grants from the NIH that met this criterion, only 42 (or 76.4%) had published their results.

Study co-author Erik Turner comments, “This study shows that publication bias occurs in psychotherapy, mirroring what we’ve seen previously with antidepressants and other drugs”.

“Journal articles are vetted through the process of peer review, but this process has loopholes, allowing treatment benefits to be overstated and potential harms to be understated”, Turner said.

The research community has increasingly – and sometimes grudgingly – acknowledged publication bias as a major problem, and calls have been made to require all study data to be publicly available, whether or not it ends up being published in a journal.