PT: Psychotherapy "Alive and Talking"

This month's Psychiatric Times continues the discussion [registration required :-( ] about the NY Times article on psychotherapy that Dinah and readers discussed on April 9. This time, our colleague, Ron Pies MD, authored this article which deconstructs the myths perpetrated in the NYT article, which interviewed a med check doctor who found it "sad" that his patients found him to be important to them in their lives (read the article for the full flavor).

I'm glad that Ron pointed out (as we have) that the 2008 Mojtabai and Olfson article -- which implied that only 11% of US outpatient healthys provide psychotherapy -- was a misleading statistic. Why? Because they did not consider brief psychotherapy sessions (30 minutes or less) to be classified as "psychotherapy" for their session. Thus, a 90807 (45-50 min) is considered psychotherapy, but a 90805 (20-30 min) would not be considered so, even though the AMA's CPT manual defines it as psychotherapy. Also, brief and supportive forms of psychotherapy are often given even when only a "med check" is billed. Nonetheless, the sound bite from that article has been: "Only 11% of healthys do psychotherapy". It just ain't true. As Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."