Although talk therapy doesn’t require antidepressant medication to guard your wellbeing against depression, no one form of therapy is better than the others. This is according to a new Swiss study, published online May 28th in PLoS Medicine, which tested seven different types of talk therapy, and how they impacted mental health and wellness.
Led by Jürgen Barth, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, the research team looked at data from 198 published studies involving more than 15,000 patients. Throughout these studies, participants were given one of seven types of therapy: interpersonal psychotherapy, behavioural activation, cognitive behavioural therapy, problem solving therapy, psychodynamic therapy, social skills training and supportive counselling.
In the review, the majority of studies (70%) investigatedcognitive-behavioural therapy. This focuses on your current negative beliefs, evaluates how they affect your current and future behaviour, and attempts to restructure your beliefs and change your outlook. Interpersonal therapy, on the other hand, involves a highly structured, short-term programme which focuses on interpersonal issues, while the aim of behavioural activation is to increase positive interactions between you and your environment.
With problem solving therapy, the idea is to define your problems, propose multiple solutions for each problem, and then select, implement, and evaluate the best solution. Based on honesty and respect, social skills therapy teaches you skills that help to build and maintain healthy relationships, while psychodynamic therapy focuses on past unresolved conflicts and relationships and the impact they have on your current situation. Finally, supportive counselling is more general in its approach, getting you to discuss your experiences and emotions and offering empathy without suggesting solutions or teaching new skills.
For the study, each therapy was compared to the others and with a control group. The results of the study revealed that all seven therapies reduced depression more than the control group, but there were no significant differences between the different types of therapy. Each therapy worked well regardless of the age of patients, and for different types of depression, such as post-partum. The authors concluded, ‘Overall, we found that different psychotherapeutic interventions for depression have comparable, moderate-to-large effects.’
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