Couple Therapy Better Than Drugs for Depression
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters 8/1) - Couple therapy is more effective and cheaper than drugs for dealing with depression, according to new research published on Tuesday. A partner, husband or wife of a depressed person can help their significant other overcome the blues and prevent further attacks better than standard antidepressants.
"The aim of the therapy is to take the focus off the depressed person as the ill patient and to focus on the relationship," Professor Julian Leff, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, said in an interview. "The idea is that if the relationship improves and the partner becomes supportive the depressed person is likely to feel much better."
Leff and his team divided 77 couples with one depressed partner into two groups. One group received couple therapy for a year but no drugs. The other group did not have counseling but the depressed person was given antidepressants. At the end of the year all treatments were stopped and both groups were followed up for a year.
"The couple therapy was in fact better than the standard antidepressant drugs in reducing depression during the year of treatment and this advantage persisted in a second year when neither group received any treatment. So it has a preventive aspect against further attacks of depression," said Leff.
The research published in The British Journal of Psychiatry showed couple therapy was effective regardless of the sex of the depressed patient or the severity of the depression. "The average improvement was quite substantial," Leff added. In one third of the 77 couples the partner of the depressed patient was also depressed.
"We think (couple therapy) ought to be brought into primary care where the general practitioner works because this is where the great majority of depressions are present. The response of the general practitioner is usually to prescribe drugs," said Leff. In a separate report published in the journal, a researcher from the University of Kansas in the United States said an overview of published studies showed that psychotherapy had measurable effects on the brain.
Improvements in neuroscience and brain monitoring techniques are leading to a new era in which different types of therapies can be designed to target specific sites of brain functioning just as drugs do. "Psychiatry is at risk of becoming a house divided against itself, with psychosocial specialists in one camp and neuroscientists in another," Professor Glen Gabbard said in a statement. "The irony of our resistance to integrating the mind and the brain is that we now stand on the threshold of a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between the brain and the environment," he said.
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