On 2017 Apr 13, Konstantinos Fountoulakis commented:

This paper compares CBT with short-term psychoanalytical therapy and versus a brief psychological intervention. The results of the paper suggest no difference between the three types of interventions and the conclusion is as follows: ‘Short-term psychoanalytical psychotherapy is as effective as CBT and, together with brief psychosocial intervention, offers an additional patient choice for psychological therapy, alongside CBT, for adolescents with moderate to severe depression who are attending routine specialist child and adolescent mental health service clinics’. Essentially this conclusion is misleading. The description of the ‘brief psychosocial intervention’ suggests it was something between a general psychoeducational approach and supportive psychotherapy, and it was delivered by the usual general staff of the setting without any specialized training in a treatment-as-usual approach. Therefore the interpretation of the results is either that the brief psychosocial intervention was a kind of placebo, and in this case the ‘active’ psychotherapies did not differ from a placebo condition (negative trial), or, if the brief psychosocial intervention is indeed efficacious, then the results do not support the added value of the more complex, demanding, expensive and time consuming CBT and psychoanalytical treatments applied by highly trained therapists versus simpler techniques applied by nurses. In my opinion, the results of this study do not support the applicability of cognitive and psychoanalytical theories in the treatment of adolescent depression but this is not entirely clear and it is debatable. What is clear, is that CBT and psychoanalytic therapy are not better than simpler and cheaper treatment-as-usual psychosocial interventions which are traditionally routinely applied in many clinical settings already.

On 2017 Apr 13, Konstantinos Fountoulakis commented:

This paper compares CBT with short-term psychoanalytical therapy and versus a brief psychological intervention. The results of the paper suggest no difference between the three types of interventions and the conclusion is as follows: ‘Short-term psychoanalytical psychotherapy is as effective as CBT and, together with brief psychosocial intervention, offers an additional patient choice for psychological therapy, alongside CBT, for adolescents with moderate to severe depression who are attending routine specialist child and adolescent mental health service clinics’. Essentially this conclusion is misleading. The description of the ‘brief psychosocial intervention’ suggests it was something between a general psychoeducational approach and supportive psychotherapy, and it was delivered by the usual general staff of the setting without any specialized training in a treatment-as-usual approach. Therefore the interpretation of the results is either that the brief psychosocial intervention was a kind of placebo, and in this case the ‘active’ psychotherapies did not differ from a placebo condition (negative trial), or, if the brief psychosocial intervention is indeed efficacious, then the results do not support the added value of the more complex, demanding, expensive and time consuming CBT and psychoanalytical treatments applied by highly trained therapists versus simpler techniques applied by nurses. In my opinion, the results of this study do not support the applicability of cognitive and psychoanalytical theories in the treatment of adolescent depression but this is not entirely clear and it is debatable. What is clear, is that CBT and psychoanalytic therapy are not better than simpler and cheaper treatment-as-usual psychosocial interventions which are traditionally routinely applied in many clinical settings already.