The Interpersonal Therapy for Depression: Some things to know

Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy: Interpersonal therapy for depression is a procedure specifically designed to intervene in depressive disorders. It is based on an antecedent to the mindset of psychiatry that became known in the United States as interpersonal psychiatry.

Interpersonal psychiatry started from the work of Adolf Meyer and Harry Stack Sullivan. It incorporated some ideas from social psychiatry and took up the conceptions of social roles from the Chicago school. However, this was not an application to depressive disorders of the general principles of interpersonal psychiatry. This intervention was built based on several pieces of evidence from five research fields. The fields highlighted the importance of interpersonal events in depressive disorders.

What is interpersonal therapy for depression?

Interpersonal therapy for depression is psychotherapy focused on the psychosocial and interpersonal problems of the person seeking treatment. This therapy is not derived directly from psychoanalysis, behaviorism, or cognitive therapy. However, it does use some of the concepts of these streams. With this, it contributes to increasing the interpersonal skills of the patient and their mastery over their psychosocial context.

We can affirm that interpersonal therapy for depression is an essentially eclectic therapeutic tool. Interpersonal therapy for depression focuses on the connections between pathology and the psychosocial context. Give more importance to the present than to the past.

Woman with depression

Interpersonal therapy for depression examines the patient’s current personal relationships and intervenes in the formation of symptoms. It also intervenes in the social dysfunction associated with the present depression or another episode.

Interpersonal therapy for depression is not a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Your goal is not to tackle negative thinking patterns, cognitive distortions, or false attributions.

Emphasis on the psychosocial

In interpersonal therapy for depression, psychosocial mainly refers to the different roles played by a patient and their environmental interactions. The role is understood as the meeting place between the individual way of being and what is presented to others.

Different roles and relationships can be altered by emotional or work overloads, conflicts, and losses. Disturbance due to overload tends to lessen forces. Conflicts tend to produce anguish and loss of depression.

Typically, the losses to be treated in interpersonal psychotherapy are grief, divorce, or unemployment. In the interpersonal therapy of depression, it is assumed that the appearance of the disorder already modifies the psychosocial and interpersonal context of the patient. Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy.

The practice of interpersonal therapy for depression

For interpersonal therapy, depression shows three levels of approach. These three levels would be the following:

• The symptoms.
• The social and interpersonal relationships of the patient.
• Explicit conflicts.

Interpersonal therapy for depression does not consider personality traits or existential and anthropological factors important. Its fundamental mission is to alleviate the patient’s symptoms and help her develop strategies to cope with her social and interpersonal difficulties.

Interpersonal therapy for depression emphasizes the actuality of the patient. The past matters, but only to better understand each patient’s interactive style. The therapeutic space granted to the past does not exceed the space granted to the present.

This therapy works with the patient’s cognitions, but not in a structured way. It does not use detailed protocols or tasks and self-registrations to perform at home. Some behavioral techniques such as systematic desensitization, exposure therapy, or analysis of cognitive distortions can be considered, but are not included as a general rule.

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