In a small clinical study published a few weeks ago, researchers didn’t find much difference between the three treatment groups of depressed subjects they studied — a group that received antidepressant medications, a group that received a specific type of not-commonly-practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy, and a group that received a sugar pill.
But there were some serious issues with this study from the onset, issues that call into question not only the generalizability of the results, but also their validity. It’s a shame that Reuters, who picked up on the study just yesterday, glossed over the methodology problems of the study, and instead just repeated the results as a shiny new established fact.
And easily lost in the discussion is the best result of them all — 16 weeks was all that was needed for most people in the study (who completed it) to find improvement in the symptoms of their depression, no matter what the treatment.
Let’s see what went wrong, and what the study actually tells us…
There’s a lucrative cottage industry in the U.S. for the residential treatment of almost anything you can imagine. Everything from “Internet addiction” and drug and alcohol problems, to eating and mood disorders. If you can treat it in an outpatient setting, the thinking goes, why not treat it in a “residential” setting for 30 or more days where you control every aspect of the patient’s life?
I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years writing about the importance of understanding your illness, learning all you can about possible treatments (including hearing about other people’s experiences), and becoming your own best advocate in your recovery. After all, who really knows you and your needs better than yourself?
So you’ve finally made the leap and sought out help for a psychiatric or mental health concern in your life. You’ve gone to the psychiatrist, who has asked you a lot of questions over the course of the past hour or so, and you feel a little exhausted.
In the first phase of the Internet in the 1990s, we witnessed how it broke down mental health barriers by providing individuals with information about mental disorders and treatment options. Before 1990 or so, the only way to look up the “official” symptoms for a disorder was either to get to a local library that had a copy of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, or ask a mental health professional or advocacy group about the symptoms (and hope they don’t leave out anything).