Psychiatric & psychological brief psychotherapy (PKP) proves to be on a par with long-term therapy - results of a comparative study

This is the second study to evaluate Psychiatric and Psychological Brief Psychotherapy (PKP) for depression. Following the very good therapy results of the first study, the short-term therapy (24 weekly sessions, 6 four-weekly sessions as maintenance therapy) was compared with a long-term variant of PKP (44 weekly sessions without maintenance therapy). This corresponds to the current psychotherapy guidelines for patients with statutory health insurance, which provide for two times twelve sessions for short-term therapy and up to 36 additional sessions for long-term therapy. PKP is a modular psychotherapy with the three modules of symptom therapy, emotion exposure and skills training as well as working with the dysfunctional survival rule as a maladaptive schema that prohibits, for example, anger and defensive assertion. The short-term variant is on a par with the long-term variant: highly significant improvements with good to very good effect sizes. The decisive changes take place in the first 24 sessions. After that, there are only slight improvements. If these results can be replicated, the recommendation is to prioritise short-term therapies.