What treatment works best for people with depression? Is it psychodynamic psychotherapy, in the Freudian tradition, with its emphasis on hidden, unconscious desires? Or is it Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, based on more contemporary (and less, y’know, made up) ways of thinking about psychology? How do you even do a good study on something as complicated as psychological therapy, anyway?

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom (ego) and Stuart (superego) talk about two recent reviews that summarise all the evidence on which kind of therapy works best - and find some results that surprise them both.

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Show notes

* Paper on the importance of the control group in psychotherapy RCTs

* The pros and cons of “treatment as usual” as a control group

* The 2023 meta-analysis on psychodynamic psychotherapy

* The 2023 meta-analysis on cognitive behavioural therapy

* An argument as to why CBT is the “gold standard” of psychotherapy

* Frederick Crews’s very very negative book on Freud

* The online tool we used to put the effect sizes in terms of “% of the treatment group doing better than the control group”

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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Episode 26: Psychotherapy

The Studies Show