Supportive and Supportive-Expressive Treatment for Depression (SSETD)

University of Haifa

Status

Completed

Conditions

Major Depressive Disorder

Treatments

Behavioral: Supportive Therapy

Behavioral: Supportive-Expressive Therapy

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT02728557

ISF 186.15

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study will assign patients to two types of psychotherapies in treating people with a major depression disorder, expressive versus supportive techniques, and will examine their ability to benefit from treatment based on their attachment orientation. This is a four month protocol, with a year follow up period, will compare patients receiving supportive-expressive treatment with either expressive focus or supportive focus.

Full description

One hundred patients suffering from major depression will participate in 16 sessions of supportive-expressive treatment. Patients will be randomized to one of two conditions: one that places a greater emphasis on supportive techniques, or one that places a greater emphasis on expressive techniques. These two conditions (supportive vs. expressive) hold the potential of either complementing or counter-complementing patients' attachment orientations (e.g., for a patient with higher levels of attachment anxiety, the supportive condition is complementary while the expressive is counter-complementary; the reverse is true for a patient with higher levels of attachment avoidance). Importantly, this study will employ multiple complementary methods, which will include session-by-session self-report alliance questionnaires from both patient and therapist, as well as a cognitive task assessing patients' relationship expectations, and behavioral observations of therapist-patient interactions. This study will be the first to utilize such a combination of methodologies in psychotherapy research and the first to examine the proposed mediation model. It will also be the first to manipulate the use of techniques in order to experimentally examine whether therapeutic techniques can be utilized to develop more efficient treatment models, based on the two transdiagnostic concepts of attachment and alliance. The findings will contribute both to our understanding of the relevance of attachment theory to psychotherapy research, and to the growing empirical literature on targeting transdiagnostic concepts (here, attachment and alliance) that cut across many disorders and treatment orientations. These transdiagnostic concepts can be utilized in the move towards tailoring existing psychological interventions to specific individuals according to their attachment orientations.

Enrollment

100 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 60 years old

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Meeting MDD diagnostic criteria using the structured clinical interviews for DSM-V and scoring more than 14 on the 17-item Hamilton rating scale for depression at two evaluations (one week apart).
If on medication, patients' dosage must be stable for at least three months prior to entering the study, and they must be willing to maintain stable dosage for the duration of treatment
Age between 18 and 60
Hebrew language fluency
Provision of written informed consent.

Exclusion criteria

Current risk of suicide or self-harm
Current substance abuse disorders
Current or past schizophrenia or psychosis, bipolar disorder, or severe eating disorder requiring medical monitoring
History of organic mental disease
Currently in psychotherapy