Dr. Charles Raison, CNNHealth's Mental Health expert and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University, writes regularly on the mind-body connection for better health.

God forbid, but suppose you’ve just had a heart attack. You’re about to leave the hospital. You’re going to live, but you have new stitches inside your chest and all sorts of new worries in your life.To make these worries worse, you’ve gone online and read that psychosocial factors like stress contribute 30% of the risk for having another cardiac event, and contributed at least as much to the event you just had. Depression is even more of a problem, at least as bad as continuing to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day.

As you mull these thoughts, a cheery young researcher comes into your room and encourages you to enroll in a study designed to examine treatments that might decrease your chance of having another heart attack and that might thus help you life longer. The researcher gives you a choice: You can go on an antidepressant medicine for protection or you can attend 20 hours of group psychotherapy. Which would you choose?

If you chose medications you may have made the wrong choice based on an important new study from Sweden published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine that reported that group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) appears to have the ability to protect people with heart disease from dying of their illness. On the other hand, almost a decade ago the largest study ever to examine whether antidepressants have the same long-term, lifesaving effects in people who have had a cardiac event came up negative.

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