Partners can help depressed people beat the blues
Professor Julian Leff and colleagues from the Institute of Psychiatry, London, have compared different approaches to treating depression, and shown that couple therapy, a psychological treatment, is more effective in improving depression than antidepressant drugs. Couple therapy aims to help depressed people and their partners gain new outlooks on the depressed person’s problems, attach new and more positive meanings to the depressed person’s behaviour and to experiment with new ways of relating to each other. Over the course of a year, the team treated some depressed people with antidepressant drugs, and others through couple therapy sessions with their partners. They followed up the patients for a further year after the treatment stopped. They found that couple therapy was the more effective treatment, both during and some time after the treatment period, and that fewer people dropped out compared with the drug treatment group. The findings provide a strong argument for training primary care workers in the skills of couple therapy.
British Journal of Psychiatry 2000; 177: 95-100