Combination Treatment
A large-scale study, published in 2000 by Martin Keller MD of Brown University and others, compared the (then available) antidepressant Serzone with CBASP. Six hundred and eighty-one patients with severe chronic depression (some with other psychiatric illnesses) were enrolled in the trial, and were assigned to either Serzone, CBASP, or combination Serzone-CBASP for 12 weeks. The response rates to either Serzone or CBASP alone were 55 percent and 52 percent, respectively, for the 76 percent who completed the study. In other words, a little more than half of the completers in those two arms of the trial reduced their depression by 50 percent or better.
The Serzone findings roughly correspond with many other trial results for antidepressants, and underscore a major weakness in these drugs — that while they are effective, the benefit is often marginal and the treatment outcome problematic. Similarly, the CBASP findings validate other studies finding talking therapy about equal in efficacy to taking antidepressants.
The results for the combination drug-therapy group, however, were surprising, with 85 percent of the completing patients achieving a 50 percent reduction in symptoms or better. 42 percent in the combination group achieved remission (a virtual elimination of all depressive symptoms) compared to 22 percent in the Serzone group and 24 percent in the CBASP group.
The authors of the frequently cited study noted that "the rates of response and remission in the combined-treatment group were substantially higher than those that might have been anticipated on the basis of the outcomes of previous trials in similar patients." Their figures are important, because they show that treating depression with a combination of both an anti-depressant drug and a form of cognitive behavior therapy can be highly effective, giving substantially better results than other methods of dealing with depression.
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System Of Psychotherapy
Famous quotes containing the words combination and/or treatment:
“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)