No one is denying that talking things out with a therapist can be helpful for those with depression. But, like antidepressants, psychotherapy's usefulness may be overstated, researchers say, by as much as 25 percent.
"This doesn't mean that psychotherapy doesn't work," says study co-author Steven Hollon. "It just doesn't work as well as you would think from reading the scientific literature." And that scientific literature may be partly to blame.
Due to publication bias, studies that have more positive outcomes are more likely to end up published. "It's like flipping a bunch of coins and only keeping the ones that come up heads," Hollon says..
Researchers tracked down all NIH grants awarded from 1972 to 2008 for studies examining "talk therapy"—such as interpersonal and cognitive behavior therapies—to treat depression. Of the 55 studies found, 13 (which mainly showed no psychotherapy benefits) were never published.
When the researchers tracked down the original data for those studies and included it in their calculations, talk therapy's effectiveness dropped by about 25 percent—"the same [bias] as you see in the pharma trials" for antidepressants, co-author Erick Turner said..
That doesn't negate either drugs or therapy for treating depression,. It's a "difference that suggests that hundreds of thousands of patients are less likely to benefit."
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