Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says

The New York Times:

Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday.

Their analysis is the first effort to account for unpublished tests of such therapies. Treatments like cognitive behavior therapy and interpersonal therapy are indeed effective, the analysis found, but about 25 percent less so than previously thought.

Doctors have long known that journal articles exaggerate the benefits of antidepressant drugs by about the same amount, and partly for the same reason — a publication bias in favor of encouraging findings. The new review, in the journal PLOS One, should give doctors and patients a better sense of what to expect from various forms of talk therapy, experts said, if not settle long-running debates in psychiatry about the relative merits of one treatment over another.

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The new paper is the latest chapter in a broad retrenchment across science in which researchers are scrutinizing past results to weed out publication bias and other, more deliberate statistical manipulations.

“We need to seriously consider publishing all completed studies,” whether encouraging or not, said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.

Read the whole story: The New York Times