NCT02728557

Supportive and Supportive-Expressive Treatment for Depression

The Roles of the Therapeutic Alliance in Understanding the Effects of Attachment Orientations on Outcome in Psychotherapy

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 100 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Haifa · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 60 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

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.

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Major Depressive Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Supportive-Expressive Therapy	Supportive-expressive psychotherapy for depressive disorder for 16 weeks.
BEHAVIORAL	Supportive Therapy	Supportive psychotherapy for depressive disorder for 16 weeks.

Timeline

• Start date: 2016-03-02
• Primary completion: 2021-02-17
• Completion: 2023-10-17
• First posted: 2016-04-05
• Last updated: 2025-01-27
• Results posted: 2025-01-27

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Israel