Randy Dotinga:

According to background material provided in a university news release, psychological treatments are effective in the short term in about 70 percent of adolescents with depression. But it’s not clear how these patients fare in the long term, the study authors noted.

The study included 465 teens in England who had been diagnosed with depression.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: cognitive behavior therapy (focusing on changing how people think); short-term psychoanalytic therapy (focusing on topics like dreams, memories and the unconscious); or a brief psychosocial intervention (focusing on strategies like encouraging pleasurable activities and combating loneliness).

The researchers found that 70 percent of the teens improved to a significant extent no matter which approach they tried. In those who benefited from treatment, their depression symptoms had declined by 50 percent over the next year.