Click Here to Read: Q&A: A Yale Psychologist Calls for the End of Individual Psychotherapy By Maia Szalavitz Tuesdayin Time Magazine on September 13, 2011.
To the Editors,
In your Healthland column of Sept. 13, you present an interview with Dr. Alan Kazdin. We are wholeheartedly in agreement with his opinion that effective mental health treatment needs to be made more widely available. However, his comments about individual psychotherapy are wildly inaccurate and ignore current research. ‘Ironically, as he speaks out to try to help
Alan Kazdin
suffering people, Dr. Kazdin’s remarks may damage people’s chances of receiving the most helpful treatment.
Two recent review articles, in the flagship journals of the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, document the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy (which is what Dr. Kazdin appears to mean when he speaks of “individual psychotherapy”):
The article in the American Psychological Association journal (Shedler, J., 2010, The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy, American Psychologist, 65:98-109), demonstrated in an extensive review of psychotherapy research that 1) psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy are both quite
effective 2) after therapy ends, the results of psychodynamic psychotherapy are maintained better for a longer time than the results of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, and 3) even when practicioners intend to use cognitive-behavioral therapy, they sometimes use psychodynamic psychotherapy techniques, and their patients are helped more by the psychodynamic techniques.
The American Medical Association journal article (Leichsenring, F., & Rabung, S. Effectiveness of long-term
psychodynamic psychotherapy: a meta-analysis, Journal of the American Medical Association, 300:1551-1565) reviewed research done on long-term (at least 50 sessions or one year in length) psychodynamic psychotherapy, and compared it to short-term treatments. The authors demonstrated that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is more helpful than the kinds of short-term psychotherapy that are usually called “evidence-based”. This was shown to be true for people with many kinds of emotional problems, and it was especially true for more severe problems.
We hope that you will publish this information so that Dr. Kazdin’s outdated opinions do not mislead people and frighten them away from the help they need.
John Rosegrant