Patients who don’t respond well to medication for depression are often referred for psychotherapy. But there has been little evidence that this actually works. A recent trial attempted to assess whether this method could help patients.

In order to test whether phone therapy is helpful as an adjunct to antidepressant medication, researchers enrolled 600 depressed outpatients in a randomized trial.

Most treatment guidelines recommend cognitive behavioral therapy as first-line psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. In this article, Dr. Glen Spielmans will give you a brief primer of CBT techniques for panic disorder, social phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as review whether, for these conditions, CBT is indeed superior to other forms of therapy.

Over the past several months, we have reviewed several articles that have endorsed cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of depression. In some cases, CBT has appeared even more effective than antidepressants, at least for the long-term prevention of relapse. But now, along comes a paper that appears to show that CBT isn’t particularly effective after all.

A variety of psychotherapy techniques work well for eating disorders, particularly for bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. This article gives a brief summary of the evidence from controlled clinical trials.

In a nationally representative sample of office-based psychiatrists, the percentage of patient visits involving at least 30 minutes of psychotherapy dropped from 44% in 1996-1997 to 29% in 2004-2005.

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is widely acknowledged to be the most well-researched, and possibly the most effective therapy option for a wide variety of disorders. The problem is that it is not widely available, particularly in the treatment of patients with substance abuse disorders.

Here’s an outrageous question for you: Does psychotherapy work? Of course it does, you say, particularly cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). CBT has become so mainstream that Forbes magazine devoted its April 2007 cover article to it.

Over 30 years of practicing and teaching psychotherapy with a range of patients, Dr. Arnold Robbins has developed an integrated approach that can be individualized and is useful for his patients.

How do you combine CBT and psychopharm? What techniques are helpful for reducing hallucinations? Do you use CBT specifically to improve adherence to medications? These questions and more are addressed.