Supportive Evidence: Brief Supportive Psychotherapy as Active Control and Clinical Intervention

Supportive psychotherapy has long had an undeservedly weak reputation. This review aims to describe the use of manualized, time-limited brief supportive psychotherapy (BSP) and its testing in clinical trials across three decades. Although numerous clinical descriptions of supportive psychotherapy exist, its use is reportedly widespread, and several supportive psychotherapies have been used in psychotherapy trials, BSP is the first and sole supportive psychotherapy manualized for research. BSP was designed as a nondirective, affect-focused, bare-bones common-factors treatment.

Collecting data from the nine randomized controlled trials involving BSP, eight of them published, the author presents a narrative summary of findings.

Eight trials addressed mood disorders and one addressed social anxiety disorder. Sample size varied. Most BSP trials resulted in “dead heat” comparable outcomes. BSP generally showed large effect sizes for improvement on the primary outcome variable (range d=0.62–1.01). Delivering it won over some therapists from exposure-based backgrounds.

Despite its perennial role as an unfavored control condition, BSP held its own in competition with more symptom-focused therapies, usually producing a dead-heat outcome. The findings indicate the importance of psychotherapeutic common factors and the potency of BSP as an active treatment condition.