Daniel Strunk, Ph.D. on Cognitive Therapy for Depression

Dr. Strunk, a cognitive-behavioral therapy researcher, describes results of his recent psychotherapy research. Specifically, he has examined the contributions of two aspects of the psychotherapy process, rapport (or the quality of the relationship between therapist and client) and technique (or the consistency with which the therapist sticks to teaching core cognitive therapy principles within therapy sessions, and found that, given a pool of reasonably competent therapists (some masters and some journeymen), there is a direct relationship between the consistent teaching of cognitive techniques and early symptom remission, but not really a relationship between how well therapists and clients think of each other and symptom remission. Dr. Strunk is quick to point out that rapport would likely have become more important if therapists taking part in the research had been seriously lacking in rapport building skills. He emphasizes that both cognitive therapy for depression and medication therapy for depression have been shown to be effective treatments for depression, and that since the majority of depressed people go untreated, the most important thing is that people who are suffering get themselves into an effective treatment of some kind.