Talk Therapy and Antidepressants

Antidepressants are often not enough to alleviate depression and prevent it's recurrence. In many cases, therapy is also beneficial. In fact, it has been shown that in teens, for whom antidepressants are risky and have not proved particularly effective, a combination of antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy can be extremely beneficial. Some advantages of therapy are the long term tools which many believe it provides to patients so that they can continue to cope with life even after treatment ends. Also, therapy does not have side effects like antidepressants often do. Is therapy alone as effective as medication in treating depression? One study says that cognitive therapy can match up to the drugs. In this study, those who took medication alone and those who underwent therapy alone both improved at the same rate but those who had therapy had less recurrences than those who took medicine. This is not such a surprisingly result. The chemical imbalance that antidepressants affect is not the sole cause of depression, if a cause at all, it is correlated with it, however, and the treatment of it has shown to help with depression symptoms. It follows though that if you stop treating the imbalance, recurrence is more likely if the patient has not had any therapy because the patient may not have ever dealt with the environmental causes of his or her depression. In my opinion, it seems that the best approach is to find an antidepressant that does not have unbearable side effects and that helps alleviate symptoms while also attending therapy of some kind to learn ways to cope with the causes of depression in the long term.

Sigmund Freud

Psychotherapy, also simply called therapy or talk therapy, has been used as a method to deal with all kinds of psychological phenomena ever since Sigmund Freud began the practice of psychoanalysis in the 19th century. While Freud's ideas still can be found in modern psychology, more types of therapy have developed in time. There is therapy that can be undergone individually, in groups, with family or with significant others. However, what perhaps is most pertinent to the effectiveness of the therapy is the goal of the therapist. In my next post, I will discuss in more detail a few different therapy methods characterized by the different approaches and goals of the therapist as I will not have room to do them justice in this post.


"Cognitive Therapy as Good as Antidepressants, Effects Last Longer." Medical News Today. MediLexicon International, 05 Apr. 2005. Web. 30 Mar. 2012. <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/22319.php>.

Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. "Antidepressants Plus 'Talk Therapy' Are Effective Therapy For Teen Depression." ScienceDaily, 18 Aug. 2004. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.

Halberstadt, Max. Sigmund Freud. Digital image. Web. 30 Mar. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud>.