An analysis of data collected from 33,243 patients across 103 IAPT services found that the type of therapy someone attended did not predict whether someone had improved their PHQ-9 score, a screening tool for mental health. 

Instead the team found that patients attended fewer counselling sessions compared with CBT in total. 

However outcome for two sessions of counselling was better compared with two sessions of CBT. 

The researchers Jo Pybis et al said in the journal BMC Psychiatry: “It is apparent from the findings presented here that counselling is not inferior to CBT and there would seem little, if any, rationale for committing public money to fund superiority trials of CBT in the field of depression.”