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Efficacy of psychotherapy overestimated for depression

jaeger19 said:
I would suggest that you take apart the study to see which patient groups or methodology had the greatest effectiveness. Just a suggestion. that's the nice thing about a meta analysis as well.. they do all the searching for you. So you can pull the abstracts from the studies and find out which ones had the greatest effectiveness rather quickly.
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From the OP study...

Depression was defined as meeting diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) or its equivalent in an earlier nosology (e.g., Research Diagnostic Criteria [17] or Feighner criteria [18]). We included studies that sampled patients who did not meet criteria for MDD only if outcomes were reported separately for those who did (since those were the patients included in our analyses). We excluded studies on children and adolescents younger than 18, but we included studies with geriatric patients since more recent studies of adults and elderly patients have found that psychological treatment efficacy does not differ with age [19].
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I took a look, unfortunately many of the studies are behind paywalls, or the servers hosting them aren't working.

Various groups were studied-young adults, women, geriatrics. The oldest study I saw was from 1977, so many of the meds would be different vs today.

A few showed both meds and therapy to be indistinguishable from placebo, or equivocal. Several showed meds to be superior. One showed therapy as superior. Several cited publication bias as the reason therapy is overestimated.
 
bg85 said:
pretty discouraging. depression is a tough condition to deal with. hopefully one day a more effective treatment will be developed but until then at least we know that current methods aren't working (according to this study which i haven't read, at least).
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Very tough, and very common.
 
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