Tag: Lieberman

Reading of the Week: Therapy, with Papers on Long-Term Effects and on Pet Therapy; Also, Lieberman on Too Much Therapy

July 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Editor

Patients with depression benefit from psychotherapy. But do those effects last?

The question isn’t new, but long-term effects haven’t been well studied. An impressive new World Psychiatry study by Pim Cuijpers (of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and his co-authors brings needed data to the discussion. They did a meta-analysis of 191 RCTs with 209 comparisons between treatment and control groups, involving 33 691 participants. “We conclude that psychotherapies have moderate to large effects at 3 months after randomization, which slowly decrease during the next 9 months to a moderate level, and remain stably moderate for several years.” We consider the paper and its implications.

In the second selection, from The American Journal of Psychotherapy, Michelle Geiss (of Southern Illinois University) and her co-authors analyzed a canine-assisted intervention (CAI) on an inpatient unit, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 psychiatric nursing staff members. “CAI was perceived by staff as a valuable complementary therapy in the inpatient psychiatric setting, offering emotional, social, and therapeutic benefits for both patients and staff.”

And in the third selection, psychologist Harvey Lieberman reflects on psychotherapy in an essay for The New York Times. As a therapist, he wonders whether too many people seek therapy. “For some people, therapy can help in ways nothing else can. But many will find that the best forms of understanding and emotional support flow from informal networks of relatives, neighbors and friends, not the health care system.”

Note: there will be no Reading next week.

DG

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Reading of the Week: Psilocybin for Depression – The New NEJM Paper

April 29, 2021 /

From the Editor

Is this the breakthrough we have been waiting for?

This week, we look at the new study from The New England Journal of Medicine considering psilocybin (a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in some mushrooms) and escitalopram for depression. The paper, written by Robin Carhart-Harris (of Imperial College) and his co-authors, has received much attention. One online news source quipped: “Tripping may be as effective as your antidepressants.”

In this study, psilocybin was compared to the SSRI with a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial. Carhart-Harris et al. find: “On the basis of the change in depression scores on the QIDS-SR-16 at week 6, this trial did not show a significant difference in antidepressant effects between psilocybin and escitalopram in a selected group of patients.”

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We consider the paper and the editorial that runs with it by Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman (of Columbia University). We also ask Dr. Ishrat Husain (of the University of Toronto) for his thoughts. Finally, we mention other cutting-edge treatments.

DG

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Reading of the Week: Dr. Lieberman’s Shrinks

March 19, 2015 /

A few years ago, a well-known celebrity — let’s call him Mr. Conway — reluctantly brought his twenty-two-year-old daughter to see me. Elena had taken a leave of absence from Yale, Mr. Conway explained, because of issues surrounding a mysterious drop in her grades. Mrs. Conway nodded assent and added that Elena’s slacking off stemmed from “a lack of motivation and low self-confidence.”
In response to their daughter’s perceived troubles, the Conways had hired a parade of motivational experts, life coaches, and tutors. Despite this pricey coterie of handlers, her behavior failed to improve. In fact, one tutor even volunteered (rather hesitantly, given Mr. Conway’s celebrity) that “something is wrong with Elena.” The Conways dismissed the tutor’s concern as an excuse for his own incompetence and continued to look for ways to help their daughter “snap out of her funk.”

They turned to naturopathic agents and meditation, and when those didn’t help, they shelled out more money for hypnosis and acupuncture. In fact, they had done everything possible to avoid seeing a psychiatrist until “the incident.”

So begins Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman’s new book, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry. Written with Ogi Ogas, the volume has just been published by Little, Brown and Company.

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