It's about a study published in PLOS one,
Does Publication Bias Inflate the Apparent Efficacy of Psychological Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of US National Institutes of Health-Funded Trials
Well, it's all very interesting. They were trying to look at publication bias in studies about talk therapy, and they found it. Of the 57 studies that met their inclusion criteria, 13 were never published-they learned about them by contacting the study authors.
And by their estimation, talk therapy is 25% less effective than previously believed.
The study looked at NIH grants between 1972 and 2008, and tried to match the grants to published studies. They were pretty thorough in their search terms:
(1) “depression” (depression, depressive, major depressive disorder, mood disorder, affective disorder, melancholic, melancholia) and (2) “psychological treatment” (cognitive therapy, behavior therapy, behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy, dynamic therapy, humanistic therapy, therapy, supportive therapy, experiential therapy, [self-] control therapy, [problem-] solving therapy, [supportive-] expressive therapy, family therapy, group therapy, marital therapy, couples therapy, aversive therapy, exposure therapy, psychotherapy, psychotherapies, psychotherapeutic, counseling, disease management, psychoanalytic, behavioral activation, cognitive behavioral analysis system, desensitization, relaxation techniques, and progressive muscle relaxation).
Of note to me is that they included "psychoanalytic", but not "psychoanalysis".
Inclusion criteria were:
(1) a randomized clinical trial examining (2) psychological treatment for (3) acute depression in (4) adults
This is a diagram of how they selected studies:
It bothers me a little that they started out with 4073 studies, and ended up with 57. But they seem to have been pretty thorough in how they went about it.
This is the table of the 57 varieties of studies they looked at:
Sorry, I meant:
Of note again to me is that 5 of the studies are in Short Term Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP).
I'm not terribly surprised by their results. I don't put that much stock in the long-term effects of short term therapy. You may recall my post, Analytic Evidence, probably worth a shifty in this context. I've never been a big fan of CBT, except in very specific presentations, but admittedly, I think my CBT training was inadequate.
What I don't like about the study, and the Times article, is the overall message to the uninitiated. These were short-term treatments, and they were heterogeneous in type. These limitations are not addressed in the discussion section of the study. So the message is that all "Talk Therapy" doesn't work as well as we thought, with no differentiation between type or duration of therapy. And this is misleading and may keep people from seeking help.