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Community Treatment for Depression Studies
For information about the causes and symptoms of depression click here.
Investigators at the Center for Psychotherapy Research are directing three studies focused on treating depression in community settings.
- Supportive Expressive Therapy versus Treatment as Usual for Depression in the Community
- What Sequence/Combination of Treatment for Depression is More Effective?
- Development of a Tool to Measure Consumer Preferences in MDD Treatment
Supportive Expressive Therapy versus Treatment as Usual for Depression in the Community
Principal Investigator: Mary Beth Connolly Gibbons, PhD (NIMH funded)
This pilot study addresses an issue of high public health significance, namely the lack of treatment response in many patients with major depression. This pilot investigation is an effectiveness trial designed to evaluate whether supportive-expressive psychotherapy (SE) is more successful in relieving depressive symptoms than the psychotherapy normally provided by the community agency.
The specific aims of this study are to:
- Assess the feasibility (recruitment, procedures) of implementing a research study in the community agency,
- Assess whether extremely busy community-based providers can devote sufficient time to research,
- Calculate effect size estimates comparing treatment with SE to treatment as usual in order to plan a sample size for a larger National Institutes of Health R01 study,
- Evaluate the acceptability of the SE therapy to patients and providers in the community, and
- Pilot the use of community longitudinal databases as a means for conducting long-term follow-up evaluations of intervention trials in the community.
What Sequence/Combination of Treatment for Depression is More Effective?
Principal Investigator: Jacques P. Barber, PhD, ABPP (NIMH funded)
This pilot investigation is an effectiveness trial designed to evaluate whether psychotherapy and therapist feedback are as effective as medication augmentation strategies for people with a primary diagnosis of major depression who do not respond to acute treatment with medication in a community setting.
The specific aims of this study are to:
- Evaluate the feasibility of conducting a sequence/combination treatment study for adult depression in a community mental health center,
- Evaluate our ability to teach cognitive therapy to therapists working in the community mental health center and to evaluate their adherence to the tenets of the treatments with the patients seen in the community mental health center,
- Collect preliminary data examining the relative efficacy of pharmacotherapy followed by the addition of cognitive therapy vs. cognitive therapy followed by the addition of pharmacotherapy,
- Collect preliminary data concerning the acceptance of the two treatments and their sequencing/combination including examining retention rates in the two sequences of treatment,
- Calculate preliminary effect size estimates comparing the two sequences of treatments in order to plan a sample size for a larger National Institutes of Health R01 study, and
- Collect preliminary data concerning the cost of the two treatments and their sequencing/combination including examining retention rates in the two sequences of treatment.
Development of a Tool to Measure Consumer Preferences in MDD Treatment
Principal Investigator: Paul Crits-Christoph, PhD (NIMH funded)
The overall goal of this grant is to develop and pilot an instrument that helps guide clinical treatment decisions for people seeking treatment for major depressive disorder in a community mental health setting by incorporating evidence-based practice data that has been customized to the treatment preferences of individual consumers.
For information about the CLOSED Treatments for Depression Studies, please click here.