Cost and Outcome of Behavioural Activation versus Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Depression (COBRA): a randomised, controlled, non-inferiority trial.

Background: Depression is a common, debilitating, and costly disorder. Many patients request psychological therapy, but the best-evidenced therapy-cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)-is complex and costly. A simpler therapy-behavioural activation (BA)-might be as effective and cheaper than is CBT.

Rumination-focused cognitive behaviour therapy vs. cognitive behaviour therapy for depression: study protocol for a randomised controlled superiority trial.

Background: Cognitive behavioural therapy is an effective treatment for depression. However, one third of the patients do not respond satisfactorily, and relapse rates of around 30 % within the first post-treatment year were reported in a recent meta-analysis. In total, 30-50 % of remitted patients present with residual symptoms by the end of treatment.

Cost and outcome of behavioural activation versus cognitive behaviour therapy for depression (COBRA): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

Background: Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for depression. However, CBT is a complex therapy that requires highly trained and qualified practitioners, and its scalability is therefore limited by the costs of training and employing sufficient therapists to meet demand. Behavioural activation (BA) is a psychological treatment for depression that may be an effective alternative to CBT and, because it is simpler, might also be delivered by less highly trained and specialised mental health workers.

A brief guided self-help intervention for psychological distress in palliative care patients: a randomised controlled trial.

Background: Previous findings implicated rumination (recurrent dwelling on abstract concerns) in elevated psychological distress in palliative patients. We hypothesised that reducing rumination may be important in addressing psychological distress in palliative care.

Aim: This study tested the prediction that a brief guided self-help technique targeting abstract rumination would reduce psychological distress in palliative patients.

Concreteness training reduces dysphoria: proof-of-principle for repeated cognitive bias modification in depression.

A tendency toward abstract and overgeneral processing is a cognitive bias hypothesized to causally contribute to symptoms of depression. This hypothesis predicts that training dysphoric individuals to become more concrete and specific in their thinking would reduce depressive symptoms. To test this prediction, 60 participants with dysphoria were randomly allocated either to (a) concreteness training; (b) bogus concreteness training, matched with concreteness training for treatment rationale, experimenter contact, and treatment duration but without active engagement in concrete thinking; (c) a waiting-list, no training control.