Value of phone therapy in depression

Clinical Psychiatry News, Oct, 2005 by Kevin Foley

Patients in a telephone-administered cognitive-behavioral therapy program showed significant improvement in depression and positive affect, reported David C. Mohr, Ph.D., of the Veterans Administration Medical Center, University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues.

In a controlled 16-week trial of 127 subjects with depression and functional impairment caused by multiple sclerosis, the 62 subjects randomized to telephone-administered cognitive-behavioral therapy (T-CBT) showed greater improvement in major depressive disorder frequency (p = 0.02), compared with the 65 control subjects randomized to telephone-administered supportive emotion-focused therapy (T-SEFT).

The T-CBT group also showed greater improvement in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score (p = 0.02) and Positive Affect Scale score (p = 0.008), but not in Beck Depression Inventory score (p = 0.29). Only 5.5% of the 127 subjects dropped out of the study, a low attrition rate, they said (Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 2005;62:1007-14).

Treatment gains were maintained during a 12-month follow-up, the investigators said. However, the treatment differences between the two groups disappeared by the end of the follow-up.