Early trauma, frequency of sessions, and treatment effects in chronic depression
chronic depression, depressed, traumatization, trauma
An unexpected, post hoc finding of the LAC study was that more than 80% of chronically depressed patients participating in the study suffered from early trauma, and that these patients responded especially well to high frequency psychoanalytic psychotherapy, often achieving sustained, structural changes in personality organization. A review of clinical observations revealed that patients in high-frequency psychoanalytic treatments were more likely to be successful in therapeutically regaining the primal trust in a helping Other and their own self agency that had collapsed as a result of traumatization than in low frequent treatments (see e.g. [A meta-analysis of including a variety of psychotherapies for chronic depression reported a strong association for symptomatic improvement with the number of treatment sessions [