According to a new study, previous printed scientific literature concerning psychotherapy–also known as “talk therapy”–has grossly over stated the therapy’s benefits for depression treatment.
This doesn’t mean that talk therapy doesn’t work, “it just doesn’t work as well as you would think from reading the scientific literature,” said Steven Hollon co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Vanderbilt.
This doesn’t mean that psychotherapy doesn’t work. Psychotherapy does work. It just doesn’t work as well as you would think from reading the scientific literature.
The problem stems from the fact that studies done on the treatment of depression with positive outcomes are more likely to be published than studies with less favorable results. The New York Times reports that studies with less than positive results backing talk therapy are rarely published.
“It’s like flipping a bunch of coins and only keeping the ones that come up heads,” said Hollon.
It’s like flipping a bunch of coins and only keeping the ones that come up heads.
Hollon and his colleagues’ research included identifying all of the clinical trials of psychological treatments for depression awarded grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health from 1972 to 2008. They discovered that 13 out of the 55 studied did not publish their trial results.
Gathering the results of the 13 unpublished studies along with previously published data, Hollon and his team conducted a series of meta-analyses with a more honest look at success rates for talk therapy – they concluded that psychotherapy works, but its effectiveness is highly overrated due to publication bias.
Psychotherapy is about 25 percent less effective than previously believed, reports Vanderbilt News.
Nearly six million Americans undergo psychotherapy each year to treat depression. Engaging in talk therapy along with taking antidepressant drugs raises their chance of improvement by 20 percent according to Hollon’s study. Previously, that number was 30 percent, which is a difference of hundreds of thousand patients less likely to benefit from talk therapy.
Whether study results are positive or not, “we need to seriously consider publishing all completed studies,” said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Wicherts was not involved in the study.
We need to seriously consider publishing all completed studies.
In an unrelated study out of China, it was shown that a diet rich in seafood can stave off depression.
