NCT00818636

Expressive Writing for Co-Occurring Depression and Alcohol Misuse

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 89 (actual)
• Sponsor: Baylor College of Medicine · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

\*\*\*Please note that this study does not offer comprehensive treatment program for alcohol abuse or depression. Please do not contact the study staff if you are seeking psychological treatment. Further, this study is only enrolling people who are clients at Career and Recovery Resources, Inc., in Houston. The hypothesis is that writing about feelings and thoughts will help people who are in group treatment feel less depressed and abuse alcohol less.

Detailed description

Expressive writing applied to a variety of populations (e.g., HIV, cancer, PTSD, depression) has been associated with health improvements, reductions in symptoms of emotional distress, and one preliminary study found reductions in alcohol misuse among college students. Data suggest that expressive writing is a technique to facilitate emotional processing that can influence a number of clinical outcomes by facilitating cognitive restructuring (Hunt, 1998; Pennebaker, 2004). In addition to examining cognitive content change following expressive writing, we believe the effects of emotional writing on mood and drinking may involve two additional processes that have been found significant for both depression and alcohol misuse, namely experiential avoidance and ruminative thinking. We hypothesize that expressive writing will lead to less drinking and enhanced mood by reducing: (1) negative thought content, (2) experiential avoidance of unpleasant private events (e.g., negative thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations), and (3) ruminative thinking.

Conditions

• Depression
• Alcohol, Drinking

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Expressive writing (in addition to group therapy as usual).	Participants in the expressive writing condition write about their feelings about an issue of their choosing three times, for at least 20 minutes each time, during a two week period.

Timeline

• Start date: 2008-08-01
• Primary completion: 2010-03-01
• Completion: 2011-12-01
• First posted: 2009-01-08
• Last updated: 2015-01-27

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States