ABSTRACT
In 1957 Eugene Levitt published a devastating review of the child and adolescent psychotherapy literature. The cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) response rate and effects on dimensional measures were almost identical to clinical trial results, supporting the effectiveness of the intervention in the new context of community practice. CBT for youth depression seeks to alleviate symptoms by addressing the core cognitive and behavioural factors implicated in these etiological models. Most of the therapy protocols have never been tested in the heterogeneous samples of clinical practice, and it is unclear whether the interventions shown to be efficacious in controlled clinical trials would be effective in the real world. There were only 21 controlled studies of psychotherapy, with 86% of these assessing the efficacy of the dominant therapy model: cognitive–behavioural therapy. The mean symptom slope for community treatment more closely resembled the clinical trial control condition benchmark than the CBT benchmark.
