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 empathy, psychotherapeutic treatment for borderline personality disorder, and research on psychological treatment of depression.
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
February 2017
The Importance of Psychosocial Factors in Mental Health Treatment
Greenberg, R.P. (2016). The rebirth of psychosocial importance in a drug-filled world. American Psychologist, 71, 781-791.
In this thoughtful piece, Greenberg reviews the research on psychosocial factors that affect mental health treatment outcomes – including for medications and in psychotherapy. There has been an important shift in the last few decades to view mental disorders, including depression, as biologically based. For example, surveys indicate that the public’s belief in biological causes of mental illness rose from 77% to 88% during a 10 year period. During the same period the belief in the primacy of biological treatment for mental disorders rose from 48% to 60%. Further, 20% of women and 15% of men in the US are currently taking antidepressant medications. Some of these trends are due to direct to consumer marketing of medications by the pharmaceutical industry, which saw a 300% increase in sales in antidepressants. Some of these trends are also due to Federal agencies like the National Institute of Mental Health that vigorously pursued an agenda of biological research. But what is the evidence for a purely biological view of mental health? Greenberg notes that the evidence is poor. For example, no one has been able to demonstrate that a chemical imbalance actually exists to explain depressive symptoms – which undermines the reason for using medications to treat depression. Further, research on the efficacy of antidepressant medications shows that they perform only slightly better than a placebo pill, prompting a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine to declare that this difference is unlikely to be clinically meaningful. The placebo effect is essentially a psychosocial effect. It refers to: the patient’s experience of a caring relationship with a credible professional, and the patient’s expectations and hopes of getting better. Placebo is a very real phenomenon that also has an impact on purely medical interventions like surgeries. In psychotherapy trials, relational/contextual factors like therapeutic alliance, expectations, therapist empathy, and countertransference likely account for more of the client’s outcomes than the particular therapeutic technique that is used. In both psychotherapy and medication treatments for depression, it appears that the more patients perceived their doctors as caring, empathic, open, and sincere, the greater their symptom improvement. There is also good evidence that psychotherapy is as effective and antidepressants for mild to moderate depression, and that antidepressants are slightly superior for chronic depression. However, even the latter should be interpreted carefully and within the context that patients prefer psychotherapy, their adherence to medications is poorer, side effects are worse for medications, and drop out rates are lower for psychotherapy.
Practice Implications
Patients benefit from antidepressant medications, but perhaps not exactly for the reasons that they are told. Psychosocial factors likely account for a large proportion of the effects of many medically-based interventions for mental disorders. Psychosocial factors are actively used in many psychotherapies, and therapists’ qualities like their ability to establish an alliance, empathy, and professionalism account for a moderate to large proportion of why patients get better.
January 2017
Individual versus Group Psychotherapy
Burlingame, G.M., Seebeck, J.D., Janis, R.A., Whitcomb, K.E., Barkowski, S., Rosendahl, J., & Strauss, B. (2016). Outcome differences between individual and group formats when identical and nonidentical treatments, patients, and doses are compared: A 25-year meta-analytic perspective. Psychotherapy, 53, 446-461.
With increasing service demands being put on mental health systems, clinicians and administrators are looking to more efficient ways of providing care to more patients. One option is group therapy in which more patients can be treated with fewer resources. However, are groups as effective as individual therapy for mental disorders? This meta-analysis by Burlingame and colleagues addresses this question by examining 67 studies in which group and individual therapy were directly compared within the same study. The majority of studies included adults with anxiety, mood, or substance use disorders, with some studies focusing on medical conditions, eating or personality disorders. Two-thirds of studies were of cognitive-behavioral therapy, but other treatment types like interpersonal, psychodynamic, and supportive therapy were also tested. Groups were defined as having at least 3 patients per group. The average number of sessions for group and individual therapy were equivalent (group M = 14.67, SD = 8.75; individual 15.94, SD = 14.37)), and as expected group therapy sessions were longer in minutes (M = 100.39, SD = 30.87) than individual therapy sessions (M = 56.55, SD = 14.37) given the multi-person demands of groups. Groups were primarily closed to new members after starting, they tended to have homogenous membership based on diagnosis, and groups tended to be co-led by 2 therapists. Individual and group therapy were not significantly different for all disorders and outcomes at post-treatment (g = -0.03; 95%CI = -0.10, 0.04), short-term follow-up (g = 0.01; 95% CI = -0.13, 0.11), and long-term follow-up (g = 0.00; 95% CI= -0.12, 0.13). Drop out rates for group therapy (17.28%) and individual therapy (14.96%) were not significantly different (OR = 1.10; 95% CI = 0.90, 1.33), and patients were likely to accept group therapy (88.76%) as often as they accepted individual therapy (84.83%) when one or the other was offered. Pre- to post-treatment effect sizes were moderately large for both interventions (group: g = 0.60, 95% CI = 0.48, 0.72; individual: g = 0.53, 95% CI = 0.42, 0.65). Patients presenting with depression, substance us, anxiety, or eating disorders had the highest level of improvement.
Practice Implications
When identical treatments, patients, and doses are compared, individual and group therapy resulted in equivalent outcomes across of a variety of disorders. This is good news for clinicians and agencies looking to maximize resources to treat more patients. However, running a group is more complex than providing individual therapy. Finding a sufficient number of patients to start a group, assessing and preparing each patient prior to starting a group, writing a note per patient per session, and managing attrition is logistically more challenging. Further, most therapists are not formally trained to provide group interventions and so they may find the task of managing a substantially larger amount of within-session group process information to be complex. Finally, as Burlingame and colleagues indicate, there are institutional considerations so that group programs require a milieu that supports group referrals and flexibility in scheduling. Nevertheless the findings of this meta analysis indicate the potential for group therapy to provide efficacious treatments for mental disorders.
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.
December 2016
Effects of Combining Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy on Quality of Life in Depression
Kamenov, K., Twomey, C., Cabello, M., Prina, A.M., & Ayuso-Mateos, J.L. (2016). The efficacy of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and their combination on functioning and quality of life in depression: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, doi: 10.1017/S0033291716002774.
Both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are efficacious for reducing symptoms of depression. Some studies suggest that functioning (i.e., the ability to engage in work, school, and social activities) and quality of life (i.e., satisfaction with these activities and perception of one’s health) are just as important to depressed patients as is reducing their symptoms. In fact, many patients place greater priority on improving functioning compared to reducing symptoms. In this meta analysis, Kamenov and colleagues assess the relative efficacy of psychotherapy vs pharmacotherapy in improving functioning and quality of life. They also evaluate if combining psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy is efficacious relative to either treatment alone. The meta analysis included k = 153 studies of over 29,000 participants. Psychotherapies often included CBT and interpersonal psychotherapy. Compared to control groups (k = 37 to 52) both psychotherapy (g = 0.35, 95% CI = 0.24, 0.46) and medications (g = 0.27, 95% CI = 0.21, 0.32) significantly improved functioning. Also, compared to controls both psychotherapy (g = 0.35, 95% CI = 0.26, 0.44) and medications (g = 0.31, 95% CI = 0.24, 0.38) significantly improved quality of life in depressed participants. In studies that directly compared psychotherapy and medications, there were no significant differences when it came to improving functioning, but there was a small significant advantage to psychotherapy over medication for improving quality of life (g = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.01, 0.43). Combined psychotherapy and medications (k = 19) was more effective to improve functioning compared to pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.34, 95% CI = 0.18, 0.50) and compared to psychotherapy alone (g = 0.32, 95% CI = 0.14, 0.49). Combined treatment was also more efficacious for improved quality of life compared to medications alone (g = 0.36, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.62) and to psychotherapy alone (g = 0.39, 95% CI = 0.19, 0.58).
Practice Implications
Combined treatment of medications and psychotherapy is more effective than either treatment alone for improving functioning and quality of life. However, most patients prefer psychotherapy to medications, and some studies indicate that many patients choose not to get treated at all rather than receive medications. Further, quality of life can be substantially compromised by medication side effects. Clinicians should take these factors into account when considering monotherapy with antidepressant medications or combined treatment of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for depression.
Placebo Response Rates in Antidepressant Trials
Furukawa, T.A., Cipriani, A., Atkinson, L.A., Leucht, S., Ogawa, Y., … Salanti, G. (2016). Placebo response rates in antidepressant trials: A systematic review of published and unpublished double-blind randomised controlled studies. Lancet Psychiatry, 3, 1059-1066.
The placebo response in medication trials is an interesting and important phenomenon. Placebo response refers to improvement in clients that is due to therapeutically powerful factors like client’s expectations that an intervention will be effective and to the therapeutic relationship with the health care provider. In medication trials, placebo is seen as problematic because researchers typically want to demonstrate the effectiveness of the active medication (e.g., selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) independent of any other factors. For this reason, randomized clinical trials of medications are often double-blind and placebo controlled (i.e., clients and clinicians are unaware of who received the active medication and who received the inert placebo pill). It has widely been suspected that over the years the placebo response has been increasing in antidepressant trials possibly due to the types of patients included in trials (i.e., more recently, patients with more severe symptoms are included) and to other methodological issues (e.g., use of multi-centre trials, dosing schedule). An increasing placebo response is suspected of contributing to the growing number of failed anti-depressant trials (i.e., trials that show little or no effectiveness of the medication). Using advanced statistical methods, Furukawa and colleagues evaluated in a meta analysis if placebo response in medication trials was increasing over time. They defined a response as a 50% or greater reduction in observer-rated depression scale scores from baseline to 8 weeks. Their review included 252 placebo controlled trials of antidepressants from 1978 to 2015. Placebo response rates ranged widely from 0% to 70% (I2 = 74.1%) with a mean placebo response of 35% to 40%. Year of publication was not significantly related to placebo response rate after controlling for methodological variables like length of the trial, multi-centre trials, and dose regimen. That is, once change in the methodology of conducting trials over time was accounted for, the placebo response appeared to remain largely the same from year to year.
Practice Implications
The placebo response is very real and complicates our understanding of how and why antidepressants might work for some patients. About 35% to 40% of patients who benefit from antidepressants may be benefitting largely because of the expectation of getting better. Greater treatment response to antidepressants for a large proportion of patients appears to be dependent on the therapeutic features of supportive contact with a caring health professional.
November 2016
Do All Depression Scales Do a Good Job of Measuring Depression?
Fried, E.I. (2016). The 52 symptoms of major depression: Lack of content overlap among seven common depression scales. Journal of Affective Disorders.
Depression is a leading cause of disability in the world and an important reason why people seek psychotherapy. Depression is also the most commonly studied disorder in psychological treatment studies. Measuring depression with self-report or clinician rating scales seems straight forward, but it turns out that it is not. This is important for clinicians because we assume that scales assess depressive symptoms in a reliable way, and that this measurement gives a valid indicator of a patient’s level of depression and improvements in the depressive symptoms. In this review Fried examined the content of the seven of the most common measures of depression including: the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CESD), and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRDS). Many might assume depression to represent a single construct – meaning depression is sometimes thought to represent one unitary thing that is consistent across individuals. Because of that assumption, some might consider depression scales to be interchangeable. But according to Fried, these seven scales listed a total of 52 different symptoms. Using a statistical approach called a Jaccard Index, Fried found that the overlap in symptoms among the different depression scales was low (i.e., different scales seemed to be tapping into different symptoms). When he reviewed the content of each scale, this low overlap seemed clear. For example, the BDI (developed by the founder of CBT) emphasizes cognitive symptoms of depression, the CESD has a number of items that are only indirectly related to depressive symptoms (like interpersonal sensitivity), and the HRDS (often used in medication trials to evaluate side effects) emphasizes somatic symptoms like insomnia, fatigue, and sexual dysfunction. Perhaps this lack of overlap is not so surprising given that the concept of depression is likely multidimensional and not representative of a single uniform construct.
Practice Implications
So what does this mean for clinical practice? Many clinicians use a depression scale to assess their patients and monitor their outcomes. Which scale one uses seems to make a difference in terms of what is being measured and what outcomes are monitored. Using the BDI will emphasize the cognitive aspects of depression, whereas ratings with the HRDS may emphasize the somatic aspects of depression. Fried recommends that researchers use more than one scale, and if the findings differ across scales, then that provides more nuanced information about the effects and outcomes of depression and its treatment. Perhaps the same can be said for clinical practice – if clinicians use only one depression scale, then they should be aware of what aspects of depression or what kind of information about their patent’s depression that the scale is providing.