Comparing Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy for Adult Depression

To the Editor: In our meta-analysis 1 of studies in which the effects of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy for adult depression were compared directly to each other, we found a trend that pharmacotherapy may be somewhat more effective than psychotherapy (P < .1), that SSRIs were more effective than psychotherapy (P < .01), and that dropout rates in pharmacotherapy were higher than in psychotherapy (P < .05). It is possible that the finding that pharmacotherapy is superior is the result of the higher dropout rates with pharmacotherapy. We did not examine this possibility in our earlier study.