TherapyRoute.com Discusses New Findings on Treating Chronic Depression

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Feb. 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Although heartened by the growing number of positive randomised and controlled trials (RCT) illustrating the efficacy of short-term Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in treating depression, TherapyRoute.com notes they may have brought unintended consequences.

View the article here: https://www.therapyroute.com/article/long-term-therapy-best-for-chronic-depression-by-msv-sinisi

The draw of short-term gains, professional bias, economic pressure, insurance/business interests, and limited resources, may contribute to these results being uncritically applied, and plainly overstated.

Frequently absent from presentations of these results is an underscoring of the following facts…

• Statistical significance is not necessarily equal to satisfactory treatment completion.
• The higher number of positive studies of short-term interventions highlights the difficulty of conducting long-term research, not the superiority of short-term interventions.
• Relapse rates are notoriously high.
• RCT’s suffer validity issues in everyday clinical settings.

TherapyRoute.com is concerned that clinicians find themselves under pressure to deliver short-term ‘evidence-based’ interventions despite judging these interventions as clinically inadequate in some circumstance, i.e. chronic depression is difficult to treat.

New findings: The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (vol. 64, 1: pp. 47-58. November 1, 2018) has published the outcomes of the first ever controlled trial comparing the outcome of long-term psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioural treatments of 252 chronically depressed patients.

• The results demonstrated that…

a. Long-term therapy produced improvement over the three-year period studied.
b. Remission rates were lower than previously seen with short-term treatments.
a. Both psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioural therapies achieved similar outcomes.
b. If given the choice participants tended to opt for psychoanalytical treatment.

• These findings are of interest for clinicians, patients, service providers, and insurance companies and imply that chronically depressed patients benefit from long-term psychotherapies.
  
• Apart from in Germany, most insurance companies do not reimburse long-term interventions and hence many patients are inadequately treated, leading to high relapse rates and negative personal, economic, and social consequences.

TherapyRoute.com believes few clinicians will be surprised by these results and invites journalists to explore the greater story of how this knowledge, despite being widespread, is obscured by…

• The politics and problems inherent in not considering evidence from sources other than RCTs.
  The false claims of evidence based psychotherapy, by Vinodha Joly.
  
• How the status quo governing what constitutes valid evidence has harmed the public by sidelining effective treatments (e.g. psychoanalytic therapy) and unfairly declaring the clinicians providing them as “not-evidence based”.
  The scientific standing psychoanalysis, by Prof Mark Solms.

Media contact:
Vincenzo Sinisi
209764@email4pr.com
+27837420114

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SOURCE TherapyRoute.com