Talk Therapy For Depression Is Overhyped, Study

Psychotherapy is not as effective in treating major depression as it is made out to be, according to a group of researchers, Medical Daily reported.

Researchers said that many psychologists have not given their work for assessment. About 25 percent of information on the importance of talk therapy has not even been published. The information would show that psychotherapy is overhyped, unlike what is thought.

"This doesn't mean that psychotherapy doesn't work," study author Steve Hollon, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology, said. "Psychotherapy does work. It just doesn't work as well as you would think from reading the scientific literature."

Hollon pointed out that clinical studies resulting in positive outcomes related to depression treatment get published, yet those that do not have positive outcomes are ignored. He said it was like "flipping a bunch of coins and only keeping the ones that come up heads."

Collecting a lot of information on clinical trials of depression from 1972 to 2008, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researchers found that about 25 percent of the studies were not published. An analysis of both published as well as unpublished studies showed that there was publication bias that overrated the importance of talk therapy, according to HNGN.

The process of articles selected for journal publications is flawed, according to the study co-author Erick Turner, associate professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine.

"Journal articles are vetted through the process of peer review, but this process has loopholes, allowing treatment benefits to be overstated and potential harms to be understated," Turner said. "The consumers of this skewed information are health care providers and, ultimately, their patients."

"[W]e doubt that simple exhortations to authors or editors will do enough to change behavior. Instead, we join with others who recommend that funding agencies or journals should archive both original protocols and raw data from any funded randomized clinical trial," the authors wrote.

The article was published in the Sept. 30 issue of PLOS One.