Odds Ratio

Psychotherapy. You know, I spend a lot of time talking about it here, and it’s no wonder — it’s an effective treatment modality that too many people simply aren’t even considering. Much less using.

Psychotherapy research is less likely to be biased than other types of treatment research, too, because researchers tend not to be treatment providers nor have any direct (or even indirect) financial incentives in the outcomes of their research. Sure, there remains the “publication bias” that affects all research, but generally speaking, I tend to trust psychotherapy research data more than I do most psychiatric medication research.

So I was interested to read a recent meta-analysis on a specific form of psychotherapy called interpersonal psychotherapy for the treatment of depression. Its treatment focus is on the relationships of the person who is coming into treatment — whether they be family, romantic, friends, or others.

Interpersonal psychotherapy doesn’t get as much press or attention as other popular forms of psychotherapy (such as cognitive behavior therapy), so fewer practitioners use it and fewer consumers know of it.

But is it effective? Here’s what the researchers found out.