A new study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry has revealed that individuals who experienced childhood trauma and suffer from chronic depression show greater improvement with long-term psychoanalytic therapy (PAT) compared to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The findings shed new light on the treatment of depression in trauma survivors, challenging the prevailing dominance of CBT as the gold standard.
The research, led by Lina Krakau, followed patients with chronic depression for five years and found that those with severe childhood trauma responded more favorably to long-term psychoanalytic therapy (PAT) than to CBT.
According to the researchers:
“As we expected, childhood trauma had a differential effect on symptom change: participants who reported more childhood trauma improved more in PAT than in CBT over a 5-year period. Clearly, PAT and CBT differed regarding therapeutic technique and the number of sessions. Previous research found that both the number of sessions and the application of psychoanalytic techniques mediated differences in outcomes following psychoanalytic versus cognitive-behavioral treatments, particularly noting that psychoanalytic techniques led to lasting symptom improvement partially driven by the discussion of early memories.”
This study suggests that trauma survivors may benefit more from long-term, exploratory therapy such as psychodynamic therapy, which focuses on early memories and deep emotional processing. This approach offers better long-term relief for those with high levels of childhood trauma and could be a viable treatment for chronic depression.
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That’s because CBT is concerned with the way thought shapes action, but not the traumatised affective substrata that produces both thought and action. At least psychoanalytic therapy gives room for the trauma to express itself directly through words, which helps to make it conscious to the brain which is the important thing. But obviously this isn’t a virtue of psychoanalysis. It is an accident of psychoanalysis. The true art is the awareness and understanding of what is as it is, which implies perception that is not socially conditioned, which is precisely the way that the whole of nature remains healthy, including natural human beings. But we are conditioned by authorities and experts including therapists and psychoanalysis and psychiatry and psychologists, so can no longer heal ourselves. This is the truth my friends. So please find out for yourself, and through finding out, see how sick the world is.
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Maybe it’s because one can talk more about anything in psychodynamic therapy and the potential exists for a real bond with the therapist.
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It strikes me as odd that the psychologists are doing research on how to best “help” child abuse survivors, yet the psychologists can NOT even bill to “help” child abuse survivors.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
And all the psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers – with whom I had the misfortune of dealing – were child abuse deniers and cover uppers.
And once the medical evidence of the abuse of my child was finally handed over, and I could no longer live in denial. I asked my psychiatrist how to best help a child abuse survivor. He thought a child, who had been healing from the abuse for four years, should be neurotoxic poisoned. That was my second to last appointment with my highly deluded psychiatrist.
Maybe we should have someone – other than the very industries that have been misdiagnosing and neurotoxic poisoning, en mass, innocent child abuse survivors and their mothers, for decades – helping child abuse survivors instead?
“the prevalence of childhood trauma exposure within borderline personality disorder patients has been evidenced to be as high as 92% (Yen et al., 2002). Within individuals diagnosed with psychotic or affective disorders, it reaches 82% (Larsson et al., 2012).”
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I have great parents thank God. My problem was and still is the so called helping professions covering up classism homophobia and general nastiness with ridiculous labels and the apparently typical pills a go go approach to treating mental illness…as in will he shut up with more Ativan? Please?
I’ve had maybe one counselor I had a human connection with but even then it was contorted and distorted by the nature of the counseling relationship itself. What would I think of this person if it was an honest direct conversation outside the office environment? I still don’t know.
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Very interesting study! Nice that folks had a choice if they wanted it –of course that makes the science tricky, but still.
“The median session number was 242 for PAT and 59 for CBT.”
“We entered total dose as a control variable, showing no statistically significant effect.”
So, if not the dose then perhaps session frequency was one of the most helpful factors? Some other research on psychotherapy for depression shows this as well, with CBT or IPT twice weekly versus weekly:
Bruijniks SJE, Lemmens LHJM, Hollon SD, et al. The effects of once- versus twice-weekly sessions on psychotherapy outcomes in depressed patients. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2020;216(4):222-230. doi:10.1192/bjp.2019.265
Thanks for posting!
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What about EMDS? Said to be excellent for dealing with trauma.
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absolute rubbish.
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