IPT

Origins & Influences

Interpersonal Therapy was developed by Gerald Klerman and Myrna Weissman in the 1970s, originally not as a treatment but as a control condition — they needed a standardized therapy to compare against medication in a clinical trial for depression. They built it on Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory (personality is the pattern of interpersonal situations), Adolf Meyer's psychobiological model (illness occurs at the intersection of biology and social context), and John Bowlby's attachment theory. The result was deliberately atheoretical about the causes of depression — IPT doesn't claim to know why someone is depressed — but highly specific about the interpersonal contexts in which depression occurs: grief, role disputes, role transitions, and interpersonal deficits. This pragmatism made IPT uniquely portable. Because it doesn't require belief in any particular theory of mind, it has been successfully adapted across cultures and settings where Western psychological frameworks don't translate well. The irony of IPT is that a therapy designed as a control condition turned out to be one of the most effective treatments for depression, with WHO endorsement and strong evidence across diverse populations.