Stanford University Medical School has released a study saying that patients with severe depression who do not respond to psychotherapy should switch to pharmacotherapy, and that patients with severe depression who do not respond to drugs should switch to psychotherapy.
This may seem obvious, but to average family M.D. practitioners and Internists - the main doctors that most depressed patients see - writing prescriptions is still the most common solution. Another recent study showed that psychotherapy alone was recommended to only 4% of depressed patients by most family practitioners.
Some studies show pharmacotherapy to have an 80% relapse rate after therapy is discontinued. Nonetheless, despite current evidence-based recommendations from the AMA - advising a combination of both drug and psychotherapy - the doctors that most depressed patients see still write prescriptions... not only as the first line of defense, but as the only line of defense.
The majority of psychiatrists already recommend a combination of both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, usually cognitive-behavioral therapy. And for good reasons: the combination works a lot better.
Brain scans show that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) affects the frontal lobes of the brain, (the conscious thinking part) while the SSRIs like the anti-depressant Paroxetine work on a more primitive region at the back of the brain. Both together have a better chance of success.
To translate from brain science to psychology, using both treatment modalities affects both the conscious and unconscious minds.
It appears to take a long time for some mental health care practitioners to realize that cognitive behavioral therapy can be as effective or more effective than medication.
Not surprisingly, a number of other effective alternatives to medication continue to be ignored by the mainstream medicine.
Personal note: Decades ago, I would ask M.D.s and other healthcare professionals when the professional medical community would wake up to the potential of "alternative" mental health treatments. Usually, they would respond that more scientific research needed to be done.
Today a wealth of rigorous scientific studies support many alternative treatments for anxiety and depression. I am still asking doctors the same question. The answer I hear usually these days is "It will take time..."
Meanwhile, as scientifically supported Complimentary and Alternative Medical (CAM) treatments have become better understood by the public, 42%of people over age 18 have come to use complimentary and alternative modalities of some sort... including mental health modalities.
Many of these alternative and complimentary treatments are discussed on this site...
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