In support of supportive psychotherapy

What is it about?

Supportive psychotherapy includes the "common factors" basic to all effective therapies. Treatment focuses on the patient's emotional state, from which many patients try to distance themselves. Supportive psychotherapy has been treated as a weak alternative to fancy, alphabet soup therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychoanalysis. We carefully defined brief supportive therapy as a time-limited (12 week) treatment and found in a series of controlled studies, mainly treating major depression, that brief supportive psychothearpy worked essentially as well as fancier alternatives. This article attempts to give brief supportive therapy the good name it deserves.

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Why is it important?

It's the elemental basis of all good therapies. And it works without a lot of added bells and whistles. See also: John C. Markowitz: Brief Supportive Psychotherapy: A Treatment Manual and Clinical Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.