The landmark study of this type was carried out in the late 1970s by the psychiatrist David Spiegel of Stanford University. Women who had just gotten a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis were randomly assigned to either a group that received standard medical care or a group that, in addition, had intensive supportive group psychotherapy with other breast cancer patients. As Spiegel has emphasized in his accounts of this famous study, he went into it anticipating that the group therapy intervention might decrease psychological distress in patients, but he certainly didn’t expect that it would
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