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Patrick Luyten is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium, and with the Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Sidney J. Blatt is affiliated with the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale University. 2011 Guilford Publications, Inc.
be a distinguishing feature of psychodynamic approaches. The final three papers in this special section address treatment issues more directly. Lemma, Target, and Fonagy describe the development and preliminary evidence supporting Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT), a novel brief psychodynamic treatment that is currently being rolled out on a large scale in the United Kingdom as part of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative. DIT, based in object relations theory and attachment and mentalizing approaches, emphasizes the importance of interpersonal problems and associated mentalizing impairments in depression, echoing Panksepp and Watts emphasis on the importance of interpersonal issues in depression. The paper by Taubner and colleagues addresses the potential role of mentalization in the long-term psychodynamic treatment of depression. Certainly their results should be interpreted with caution given the small sample size. Yet, their most important finding is that mentalization impairments in depression may be specifically related to issues of loss and rejection. This finding urges clinicians to assess specific, idiosyncratic mentalizing impairments and problems, rather than
assuming that depression is associated with general interpersonal problems and mentalizing impairments. Finally, a meta-analysis by Abbass and colleagues provides evidence that brief psychodynamic treatment may also be effective in patients with comorbid personality disorder, even at long-term followup. Their finding that more than 40% of the patients recovered after brief psychodynamic treatment, and even more patients obtained clinically significant changes, is impressive given that these were depressed patients with marked personality problems. More carefully conducted, high quality studies of psychodynamic treatments of depression that are rooted in extant knowledge of the causation of depression are needed (Blatt and Luyten, 2009b; Luyten et al., 2011). Gerber and colleagues recently advanced a number of quality criteria in this context that may also be used by granting agencies (Gerber et al., in press). In the meantime, the evidence supporting the efficacy of a range of psychodynamic treatments for depression should not be neglected and governments and health care organizations should consider the broader dissemination and implementation of psychodynamic treatments for depression.
References Abbass, A.A., Hancock, J.T., Henderson, J., & Kisely, S.R. (2006). Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies for common mental disorders. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: Reviews, 4 18:CD004687. Blatt, S.J. (2004). Experiences of depression: Theoretical, clinical and research perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Blatt, S.J., & Luyten, P. (2009a). Depression as an evolutionary conserved mechanism to terminate separation-distress: Only part of the biopsychosocial story? [Commentary on Watt & Panksepp]. Neuropsychoanalysis, 11, 52-61. Blatt, S.J., & Luyten, P. (2009b). A structuraldevelopmental psychodynamic approach to psychopathology: two polarities of experience across the life span. Development & Psychopathology, 21, 793-814. Blatt, S.J., Zuroff, D.C., Hawley, L.L., & Auerbach, J.S. (2010). Predictors of sustained therapeutic change. Psychotherapy Research, 20, 37-54. Driessen, E., Cuijpers, P., de Maat, S.C.M., Abbass, A.A., de Jonghe, F., & Dekker, J.J.M. (2010). The efficacy of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 25-36. Gerber, A.J., Kocsis, J.H., Milrod, B.L., Roose, S.P., Barber, J.P., Thase, M.E., et al. (2011). A quality-based review of randomized controlled
trials of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychiatry. Leichsenring, F., & Rabung, S. (2008). Effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 300, 1551-1565. Luyten, P., Fonagy, P., Lemma, A., & Target, M. (in press). Mentalizing and depression. In A. Bateman & P. Fonagy (Eds.), Mentalizing in mental health practice. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Taylor, D. (2009). Special issue: Depressive disorders in the life cycle: Biology, environment and internal world [Guest Editorial]. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 23, 172-175. Watt, D.F., & Panksepp, J. (2009). Depression: An evolutionarily conserved mechanism to terminate separation distress? A review of aminergic, peptidergic, and neural network perspectives. NeuroPsychoanalysis, 11, 7-51.
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