Blog
The Psychotherapy Practice Research Network (PPRNet) blog began in 2013 in response to psychotherapy clinicians, researchers, and educators who expressed interest in receiving regular information about current practice-oriented psychotherapy research. It offers a monthly summary of two or three published psychotherapy research articles. Each summary is authored by Dr. Tasca and highlights practice implications of selected articles. Past blogs are available in the archives. This content is only available in English.
This month...
…I blog about therapist variables leading to poor outcomes, aspects of the therapeutic relationship and outcomes, and psychological therapies and patient quality of life.
Type of Research
Topics
- ALL Topics (clear)
- Adherance
- Alliance and Therapeutic Relationship
- Anxiety Disorders
- Attachment
- Attendance, Attrition, and Drop-Out
- Client Factors
- Client Preferences
- Cognitive Therapy (CT) and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
- Combination Therapy
- Common Factors
- Cost-effectiveness
- Depression and Depressive Symptoms
- Efficacy of Treatments
- Empathy
- Feedback and Progress Monitoring
- Group Psychotherapy
- Illness and Medical Comorbidities
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
- Long-term Outcomes
- Medications/Pharmacotherapy
- Miscellaneous
- Neuroscience and Brain
- Outcomes and Deterioration
- Personality Disorders
- Placebo Effect
- Practice-Based Research and Practice Research Networks
- Psychodynamic Therapy (PDT)
- Resistance and Reactance
- Self-Reflection and Awareness
- Suicide and Crisis Intervention
- Termination
- Therapist Factors
- Training
- Transference and Countertransference
- Trauma and/or PTSD
- Treatment Length and Frequency
June 2018
Is Short-Term Prolonged Exposure Effective to Treat PTSD in Military Personnel?
Foa, E., McLean, C.P., Zang, Y., Rosenfield, D., Yadin, E… Peterson, A. (2018). Effect of prolonged exposure therapy delivered over 2 weeks vs 8 weeks vs present-centered therapy on PTSD symptom severity in military personnel: A randomized clinical trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, 319, 354-364.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect 10% to 20% of military personnel returning from combat. PTSD is often chronic and debilitating, and is associated with symptoms that are distressing, that lower quality of life, and that negatively impact family and loved ones. Prolonged exposure therapy (PE) has been tested in the past, and researchers have claimed that it is an efficacious treatment in civilians and veterans. PE is a form of behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy characterized by re-experiencing the most traumatic event through remembering it and engaging with, rather than avoiding reminders of the trauma. In their treatment guidelines, the American Psychological Association (APA) proposed PE as a recommended treatment for PTSD. In this randomized controlled trial, Foa and colleagues assess if providing PE in intensive short time frame (massed exposure; 10 sessions over 2 weeks) was as effective as standard exposure (10 sessions over 8 weeks) for 370 military personnel in the US with PTSD. That is, the authors were interested to see if providing the same amount of therapy based on exposure in a shorter time was just as effective. They also compared the two versions of PE (massed and standard exposure) to two control conditions: present centred therapy (PCT) that is largely supportive therapy that does not rely on exposure to the trauma, and a no treatment control condition. The main outcomes were reductions in level of PTSD symptoms and reductions in PTSD diagnoses at post-treatment and up to 6 months post-treatment. Massed and standard PE were equally effective in reducing symptoms and diagnoses of PTSD compared to no treatment. However, PE was not more effective than PCT in reducing symptoms and diagnoses, and PCT was more effective than no treatment. Overall, reductions in PTSD symptoms and reduction in PTSD diagnoses were modest. Drop out rates were high at about 50% for all conditions.
Practice Implications
Drop out rates were high and outcomes were modest for these short-term psychological treatments for PTSD in military personnel, such that over 60% still had a diagnosis of PTSD at 6 months follow up. And PE therapy did no better than a control condition (PCT) that simply provided support with no exposure to the trauma. These findings are similar to other research in this area. Psychotherapy for trauma may require more time to work, and perhaps different models of understanding and treating the disorder. As Shedler recently remarked, it takes at least 20 sessions/weeks before 50% of clients improve. So it may not be surprising that 2 or 8 weeks of therapy had only a small impact on PTSD symptoms.
September 2017
Can a Unified Protocol Bring Together Diverse Evidence-Based Treatments?
Barlow, D.H., Farchione, T., Bullis, J.R., Gallagher, M.W., Murray-Latin, H.,… Cassiello-Robbins, C. (2017). The unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders compared with diagnosis-specific protocols for anxiety disorders: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2164.
One barrier to disseminating and implementing evidence-based treatments is that therapists have to learn to competently apply many different manualized protocols – at least one for each disorder that they treat (depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and others). Barlow and colleagues argue that it is possible to unify many of these protocols under one umbrella, and so they created a unified protocol for this purpose. The unified protocol is an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioral intervention that targets temperamental characteristics, particularly neuroticism and emotion dysregulation that underly anxiety, depressive, and related disorders. The unified protocol consists of motivational enhancement followed by 5 treatment modules: (1) mindful emotion awareness, (2) cognitive flexibility, (3) identifying and preventing patterns of emotion avoidance, (4) increasing awareness and tolerance of emotion related physical sensations, and (5) emotion-focused exposure. In this trial, 223 participants with an anxiety disorder (generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsive, panic disorder, or social anxiety disorder) were randomly assigned to the unified protocol, or to the evidence-based treatment specific to the disorder, or to a no-treatment wait-list condition. The sample size was large enough to test a hypothesis of equivalent findings between the two treatment conditions. The differences in changes to symptoms between the unified protocol and the specific interventions for each disorder were small and non-significant at post-treatment and at the follow-up assessments. The treatment conditions were significantly more effective than the wait-list control condition. There were no differences between the treatments in drop-out rates or treatment adherence.
Practice Implications
It may be possible for therapists to competently learn to apply a single unified evidence-based treatment for a variety of anxiety disorders that has equivalent outcomes to currently recognized but separate treatment approaches. The unified protocol suggests that the temperamental factors underlying anxiety disorders (emotion dysregulation, emotion avoidance, cognitive inflexibility) can be targeted to treat a wide-range of emotional disorders.
January 2017
Comparing Three Psychotherapies for Adolescents with Major Depression
Goodyear, I.M., Reynolds, S., Barrett, B., Byford, S., Dubicka, B., ….Fonagy, P. (2016). Cognitive behavioural therapy and short-term psychoanalytical psychotherapy versus a brief psychosocial intervention in adolescents with unipolar major depressive disorder (IMPACT): A multicentre, pragmatic, observer-blind, randomised controlled superiority trial. Lancet Psychiatry, Online first publication: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30378-9.
Major depression affects a large proportion of adolescents worldwide. The Global Burden of Disease Study Found that depressive disorders accounted for over 40% of disease burden caused by all mental and substance use disorders, with the highest burden occurring for those between the ages of 10 and 29. Although there is good evidence for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat depression in adolescents, data is scarce for long term outcomes – which is an important issue because maintaining treatment gains reduces the risk for relapse. There is also little research on alternative treatments to CBT and their long term effects. In this large study, Goodyear and colleagues (2016) randomly assigned 470 adolescents with major depression to receive CBT, short-term psychoanalytical therapy (STPT), or a brief psychosocial intervention (BPI). CBT was based on a commonly used model but adapted to include parents and emphasized behavioural techniques. The STPT model emphasized the child – therapist relationship in which the therapist emphasized understanding feelings and difficulties in ones life. STPT also included some family meeting. BPI on the other hand focused on psychoeducation about depression, was task and goal oriented, and emphasized interpersonal activities. The study also compared cost-effectiveness of the three treatments – that is, whether the treatments’ costs relative to their effectiveness were different. There were some advantages in terms of reduced depression to both CBT and STPT compared to BPI at 36 weeks and 52 weeks post treatment, but these advantages disappeared by 86 weeks follow-up. Across all three treatments, about 77% of adolescents with depression were in remission (i.e., no longer depressed) by 86 weeks post-treatment. There were no differences between the three treatments in terms of cost-effectiveness.
Practice Implications
This is one of those rare studies that is large enough to adequately compare the efficacy of alternative treatments for adolescents with major depression. CBT, STPT, and BPI were all associated with reduced depression in adolescents, and with maintenance of these improvements 1 year after the start of treatment. Both BPI and STPT provide alternative choices to CBT for patients and therapists.
September 2016
Cognitive Therapy and Dynamic Psychotherapy for Major Depression in a Community Setting
Connolly Gibbons, M.B., Gallop, R., Thompson, D., Luther, D., Crits-Christoph, K., Jacobs, J., Yin, S., & Crits-Christoph, P. (2016). Comparative effectiveness of cognitive therapy and dynamic psychotherapy for major depressive disorder in a community mental health setting: A randomized clinical noninferiority trial. JAMA Psychiatry. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.1720.
Dynamic psychotherapy is widely practiced in the community, but there remain very few trials assessing its effectiveness. Dynamic therapy targets individuals’ problematic relationship conflicts. Cognitive therapy on the other hand has been established as effective for major depression in a number of controlled trials. This study by Connolly Gibbons and colleagues was designed to test if dynamic therapy was equivalent (not inferior) to cognitive therapy in treating major depressive disorder in a community setting. There are two important and novel aspects to this research. First, the study takes place with community-based therapists in a community mental health setting. This means that the usual critique that randomized controlled trials do not speak to what therapists do with real patients in everyday practice is addressed in this study. Second, the sample size is large enough and the study is sufficiently powered so that one can make conclusions about non-inferiority (statistics geeks will know that making a hypothesis of non-inferiority, equivalence, or no difference requires enough power and a large enough sample size – something that is quite rare in psychotherapy trials). Twenty therapists who worked in a community mental health center were trained by experts in dynamic therapy or cognitive therapy. The therapists treated 237 adults with major depressive disorder with 16 sessions of dynamic or cognitive therapy. Therapists were followed the treatment manuals and they were judged by independent raters as competent in delivering the treatment. Patients on average got significantly better regarding depressive symptoms (d = .55 to .65), and there were no significant differences in the rate of improvement between dynamic and cognitive therapy patients (d = .11). There were also no differences between treatments on several measures of quality of life. A noteworthy finding was that about 80% of patients continued to have some depressive symptoms by the end of treatment even though they improved.
Practice Implications
This study adds to research indicating that short-term dynamic psychotherapy is as effective as short term cognitive therapy for treating major depression. The study also indicates that the treatments under intensive supervision and training can be provided effectively by community therapists in real world settings. That 80% of patients continued to have some depressive symptoms suggests that the short term nature of the therapies may not have represented a large enough dose of treatment for most patients.
February 2016
How Effective is Computerized CBT in Treating Depression in Primary Care?
Gilbody, S., Littlewood, E., Hewitt, C., Brierley, Tharmanathan, P....White, D. (2015). Computerised cognitive behaviour therapy (cCBT) as treatment for depression in primary care (REEACT trial): Large scale pragmatic randomised controlled trial. BMJ, 351, h5627. Doi: 10.1136/bmj.h5627.
Depression is one of the most common reasons why people see family physicians for consultation. The personal and economic burden of depression is high, such that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Effective treatments for depression include antidepressant medications and psychotherapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for depression, but is not always accessible for those who live in remote areas, and for those who cannot easily find or afford a trained psychotherapist. One solution, touted by some is to provide computerized CBT (cCBT) via internet or CD. In fact, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK recommend cCBT programs as a first step of care for depression. Commercially available cCBT programs include “Beating the Blues”, and freely available programs include “MoodGYM”. Previous research shows a large effect of cCBT for reducing depressive symptoms, but non-adherence (i.e., not completing the modules) and patient dropout rates tend to be high. Another issue is that most of the studies of cCBT were conducted by the developers of the programs, and so there may be researcher allegiance effects that could bias the findings. In this large trial, Gilbody and colleagues asked: “How effective is supported computerized cognitive behavior therapy (cCBT) when it is offered in addition to usual primary care in adults with depression?” The authors recruited 691 depressed patients seen in primary care with a general practitioner (GP) in the UK. All participants had access to a computer and high speed internet. The participants were randomly assigned to receive: (1) usual GP care plus 8 50-minute sessions of Beating the Blues, or (2) usual GP care plus 6 weekly modules of MoodGYM, or (3) only usual GP care. Usual GP care included providing antidepressants, counselling, or brief psychotherapy which are all offered as part of the UK National Health Service. Computerized CBT was supported by weekly telephone calls followed by reminder emails to encourage participants to access, use, and complete the programs. At 4 months after the start of treatment, about half of all participants were no longer depressed, and there were no differences between the three study conditions on any of the outcomes (e.g., depression, quality of life). The results were consistent up to 2 years post treatment. However, only about 17% of those receiving one of the cCBT treatments completed all of the sessions. The average number of sessions completed of cCBT was very low (Beating the Blues = 2 out of 8 sessions; MoodGYM = 1 out of 6 sessions). The authors concluded that there was no significant benefit of adding supported cCBT to usual GP care.
Practice Implications
Adding cCBT to usual GP care did not provide added benefit to depressed patients. Low adherence and low engagement with cCBT likely reduced the utility of computerized delivery of therapy. It is possible that more intensively supported cCBT (i.e., with weekly face to face contacts) might have improved the added value of cCBT, but would also have reduced the practically utility and accessibility of cCBT. Those who are depressed might have difficulty with summoning the energy and concentration necessary to repeatedly log on to computers and engage in computerized or internet based treatment.
December 2015
Long Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Treatment Resistant Depression
Fonagy, P., Rost, F., Carlyle, J., McPherson, S.,… Taylor, D. (2015). Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: The Tavistock adult depression study (TADS). World Psychiatry, 14, 312-321.
Usually I do not write about individual studies, mainly because meta-analyses and systematic reviews are much more reliable. But occasionally a unique study is published that is important enough to report. This is a rare trial that focuses on “treatment-resistant” depression defined as long-standing depression that has not responded to at least two previous evidence-based interventions. Depression is known to have a relapsing chronic course for about 12% to 20% of patients. And not responding to treatment is highly predictive of non-response to future treatment for depression. Fonagy and colleagues argued that in order to be effective, treatments for chronic and resistant depression need to be longer and more complex than current time-limited evidence-based approaches. Further, they argued that follow ups should be of longer duration. The authors tested a manualized long term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (LTPP). The treatment involved 60 sessions over 18 months provided by 22 trained therapists. In this trial, the “control” condition was treatment as usual (TAU) as defined by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the United Kingdom. TAU was made up of short term evidence-based interventions like antidepressant medications or CBT provided by licensed trained professionals. LTPP plus TAU was compared to TAU alone for 129 patients randomly assigned to one of the conditions. At pre-treatment, the majority of patients scored in the severe range on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) or the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS). The average patient had 4 previous unsuccessful treatments for depression. No differences were found between LTPP and TAU at post treatment, but differences began to emerge after 24 months. Complete remission was infrequent in both conditions after 42 months (14.9% LTPP vs 4.4% TAU). However, partial remission at 42 months was significantly more likely in LTPP (30.0%) than TAU (4.4%). Patients were significantly more likely not to meet DSM-IV criteria for depression at 42 months in LTPP (44%) than in TAU (10%). The differences between conditions in mean BDI and HDRS scores were significant and medium sized indicating greater improvement with LTPP.
Practice Implications
This is the first study of its kind to test a manualized LTPP for treatment resistant depression. Patients in LTPP were more likely to maintain gains whereas those receiving evidence-based TAU were more likely to relapse. Although this is only one study and should be interpreted cautiously, it does suggest that chronic treatment-resistant depression is more likely to respond to longer and more complex treatment, and that outcomes of such treatment tend to be maintained in the longer term.