Please be careful about treating the findings of any study as fundamental, universal truth. Science is messy and yesterday's accepted facts often becomes tomorr

Please be careful about treating the findings of any study as fundamental, universal truth. Science is messy and yesterday's accepted facts often becomes tomorrow's over simplifications. And when it comes to our understanding of treating mental illness, there are all kinds of exceptions to what we "know". None of this is black and white. This study talks about correlations. What it doesn't (and can't) have is counterfactual evidence to establish causation. Would the people who went longer have had as much success if they didn't go as long? We don't get to rewind and try. My personal experience tells me that going MUCH longer than 12-18 sessions can yield life changing results. Before therapy, I was in a very bad place, having trouble understanding why I should go on living. At one point, I found myself curled up on the sidewalk in a big city, crying in the middle of the night, unsure I'd ever make it home. I needed help and luckily I found it. In my first session, I was very explicit that I didn't want to track any goals - my high pressure job (I led a group that was responsible for a billion dollars a year in annual revenue) already had too many of those for me to handle. I was 50+ sessions and six months in before I was able to observe any benefit from therapy - my therapist could see it much earlier, but I couldn't. Six months later some brutal life events, and my way of internalizing them, put me in a worse state than when I started. I then took months of medical leave from work at the advice of both my therapist and my family doctor. After 150-200 sessions total, over the course of 2.5 years, I finally thought to myself "I feel healthy, do I need to keep going to therapy?" The very next session, before I presented that thought to my therapist, she said "You've made a ton of progress. I'm not sure it's worth your time and money to keep talking regularly. What do you think?" Today I'm 100% clear that life is worth living. And I have a much better understanding of how to recognize when my mind is processing things in an unhealthy way and what to do about it (sometimes an ad-hoc therapy session is part of the answer. Is it possible that I could have changed treatments / practitioners and found success more quickly? Of course! But it's also possible that I could have tried switching, picked something even worse for me, and ended up taking longer or even taking my own life. If we knew the optimal path, we'd take it from the start. But we don't. Medical science around mental health isn't even close to offering that. I'd hate for others to give up on much needed treatment too soon because they aren't seeing success in 12-18 sessions. If they have the capacity to change course, maybe that's the right thing to do. If they don't, then staying the course could be exactly what they need.