Alcoholism and depression are the right and left hands of a heartbreaking condition that often includes both. Nearly half of people in treatment for alcohol addiction exhibit co-occurring depression. And of people treated for major depressive disorder, nearly 40 percent will struggle with alcoholism at some point in their lives. Not only do these two challenges tend to happen together, there’s strong evidence they may actually create each other. Depression makes addiction; addiction makes depression. If you treat one without treating the other, the challenge that remains can cause relapse of the other – alcoholism can flare depression, or after addiction treatment, depression can lead to alcohol relapse.

A study in the journal Addiction looks at what we know about treating these two disorders together. Specifically, the article asks how the promising techniques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Motivation Interviewing (MI) stack up against ‘treatment as usual based’ on 12-Step models. Rather than playing whack-a-mole in which hitting one head makes the other pop up, can CBT and MI hit these two heads of alcoholism and depression at once so that neither reoccurs?