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Posts Tagged ‘effectiveness’


Apr 20

Marriage Counseling Proven Effective (Again!)

By Jay Slupesky
2 Comments
About Marriage Therapy

I love it when counseling is scientifically tested and shown to be effective!

The largest, most comprehensive clinical trial of couple therapy ever conducted has found that therapy can help even very distressed married couples if both partners want to improve their marriage. The study also involved the longest and most comprehensive follow-up assessment of couple therapy ever conducted.

“It takes only one person to end a marriage but two people to make it work,” said Andrew Christensen, a UCLA professor of psychology and lead author of the study, which appears in the April issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association.

The study included 134 married couples, 71 in Los Angeles and 63 in Seattle. Most were in their 30s and 40s, and slightly more than half had children. The couples were “chronically, seriously distressed” and fought frequently, but they were hoping to improve their marriages.

The couples received up to 26 therapy sessions within a year. Psychologists conducted follow-up sessions approximately every six months for five years after therapy ended.

When the therapy sessions were over, about two-thirds of the couples overall had shown significant clinical improvement.



Oct 31

Counseling is Effective!

By Jay Slupesky
No Comments
About Marriage Therapy



Aleut Couple, Qaqortoq, Greenland

A great study was published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Although it’s not specifically about marriage counseling or couples counseling, it does do a lot to validate that counseling (or “talk therapy”) is effective.

The researchers wanted to determine the most effective way to treat severe anxiety in children and adolescents, ages 7 to 17. What they found is that the best approach is to combine counseling with antidepressant medication (the study used Zoloft). It turned out that after 12 weeks of treatment, 80% of the patients who received the combined treatment improved significantly. Patients who got the medication but did not also get the counseling improved at a 55% rate.

I wanted to mention this study since I’m always interested in proof that counseling is effective.