Optimizing psychotherapy dosage for comorbid depression and personality disorders (PsyDos): a pragmatic randomized factorial trial using schema therapy and short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Background: Patients with comorbid depression and personality disorders suffer from a heavy disease burden while tailored treatment options are limited, accounting for a high psychological and economic burden. Little is known about the effect of treatment dosage and type of psychotherapy for this specific co-morbid patient population, in terms of treatment-effect and cost-effectiveness. This study aims to compare treatment outcome of 25 versus 50 individual therapy sessions in a year.

Memorable Experiences in Therapeutic Assessment: Inviting the Patient's Perspective Following a Pretreatment Randomized Controlled Trial.

Accumulating evidence documents the efficacy of Therapeutic Assessment (TA) in terms of symptom reduction and other outcomes, but only minimal data speak to the patient's perspective of what is memorable, or potentially important, about this intervention. In line with the humanistic and phenomenological philosophy of TA, we solicited patient input by asking personality disorder (PD) patients who participated in a recent randomized controlled trial (De Saeger et al., 2014 ) about their experiences.

Estimating subgroup effects using the propensity score method: a practical application in outcomes research.

Objective: Our aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of the univariate and generalized propensity score (PS) method in subgroup analysis of outcomes research.

Methods: First, to estimate subgroup effects, we tested the performance of 2 different PS methods, using Monte Carlo simulations: (1) the univariate PS with additional adjustment on the subgroup; and (2) the generalized PS, estimated by crossing the treatment options with a subgroup variable. The subgroup effects were estimated in a linear regression model using the 2 PS adjustments.