Benefits of Long-Term Psychotherapies
In the most recent issue of American Psychiatry News (Jan./Feb. 2009, vol. 2, no. 1), emerging empirical research has begun to confirm the benefits of long-term psychotherapy (“psychodynamic psychotherapy,” or “psychoanalysis”) for patients, compared to shorter-term (or “cognitive-behavioral”) psychotherapy.
Shorter-term therapies have been the rage in recent years, because they have been supported by more data than longer-term forms. As a result, advocates of longer-term therapies have been on the defensive as to how to justify such time, effort, and financial expenditures by patients and therapists, even though the long-term forms have seemed in clinical practice and intuitively to be better in the long run. The problem for advocates of longer-term forms has been the difficulty in demonstrating its efficacy from clinical studies.
This report from American Psychiatry News lends new support to what advocates of long-term therapy have seen in their practices and understood empirically — that longer-term forms of psychotherapy, despite the time and costs, bring about more profound and enduring changes for the patient than shorter-term therapies.