Perhaps we’ve seen the rise and fall of psychotherapy treatment. At least when it comes to depression, the most common mental disorder diagnosed today.
The numbers don’t lie, according to multiple nationally-representative surveys conducted over the past two decades.
At the start of the 1990s, psychotherapy was the treatment of choice for depression, with 71.1 percent of depressed people saying they had been treated with psychotherapy. By 1997, with the newer SSRI antidepressants firmly taking hold in prescribers’ toolboxes, that number had dropped to 60.2 percent.
When the latest research when conducted, they found 53.6 percent of depressed people surveyed in 1998 were in psychotherapy. When they looked again in 2007, that number had dropped to a new all-time low — to only 43.1 percent.
In two decades, psychotherapy went from being the primary treatment employed for depression, to becoming a minority treatment. What happened?