Peter Grant Ph.D.

This page is my newsletter, where I

publish some of my ideas on

psychotherapy and getting help. I wrote

the article on depression, talk therapy

and drugs for a newspaper in 2006. I do

 not think that it is out of date in 2010.

I saw an ad for a depression drug in

 March of 2009. The ad said that some

people still felt depressed after taking 

the antidepressant drug. Their solution

was to take another drug on top of the old

drug.

Perhaps the solution lies in the direction

 of understanding the underlying

condition, towards developing greater

emotional resilience and flexibility. This

is the mission of competent

psychotherapy.

Depression, Talk Therapy and Drugs , by Peter W. Grant, Ph.D.


     Quick--what is the difference between drugs and talk therapy in treating depression? They both have some benefits, but when it comes to feeling better in the long run, talk therapy teaches people to understand their darker feelings, while the drugs keep them away!

So when a nasty feeling makes itself felt in the year following treatment, the people who learned about their emotions didn’t fall back in the soup (only 25% did,)  while the merely medicated dropped back in like flies, to the tune of 80% !!
     
This finding, reported in a study from the January 2005  issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, buttresses claims  that talking and thinking—understanding—is the ultimate treatment and cure for many dark emotional problems

 Freud was onto something, after all.

     The science of it sounds like this: the antidepressant works to limit activity in the limbic system, the brain’s centers for emotion. The talk therapy limits activity in the center of thinking, the cortex. So when the bad feeling surfaces again, if drugs are not suppressing the limbic system, the whole of the mental system tends to become overwhelmed again—unless the mind has been trained through talk and thought to understand what is happening and is then able to continue to function adaptively rather than going in the tank.

     So when your doctor prescribes antidepressants for your blues, don’t forget to get a talk therapist to train your brain for your benefit in the long run.  Even though it is tempting to let the magic pill alone help you to evict despair, it will pay you to find a professional to talk about it with, in order to understand these feelings, and to
prepare your mind for the inevitable encounter with your dark side.

Then you will be in a good position to do the heavy lifting involved with understanding yourself in your darker moments.