‘Therapy’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, Page 20

In the largest ‘real world’ trial ever conducted, a $35 million US government study has concluded that antidepressants cure (or fail to cure) the symptoms of major depression in half of all sufferers, even when individuals are receiving the best possible care. The drugs used in the study, including Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor, work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression.

Following elderly individuals with depression for periods of up to two years, a University of Pittsburgh trial found that individuals were less likely to have recurrent depression if they received two years of maintenance therapy with the anti-depressant paroxetine. So-called ‘maintenance psychotherapy’ offered once a month for 45 minutes did not prevent recurrent depression.

The Pentagon is encouraging troops returning home from Iraq to seek counselling, and more than a third of U.S. soldiers received psychological counselling soon after returning from Iraq, according to a Pentagon study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Some 60 percent of adults with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed as just being depressed. Dr. Charles Schaffer, a Sacramento psychiatrist specializing in bipolar disorder, says simply: “That’s the problem with psychiatry. Our diagnoses are not as valid or reliable as in other specialties”.

Practitioners interested in the practice and process of online therapy can find a new paper on the topic available in our section dedicated to online training and development resources. Drawing on an evidence base of over 700,000 words of online counselling and therapy, the paper highlights several simple observations which, surprisingly, have not yet received significant exploration in the academic literature.