Reducing symptoms of major depressive disorder through a systematic training of general emotion regulation skills: protocol of a randomized controlled trial

Reducing symptoms of major depressive disorder through a systematic training of general emotion regulation skills: protocol of a randomized controlled trial

BMC Psychiatry, January 2014

24467807

Anna M Ehret, Judith Kowalsky, Winfried Rief, Wolfgang Hiller, Matthias Berking

Major Depressive Disorder is one of the most challenging mental health problems of our time. Although effective psychotherapeutic treatments are available, many patients fail to demonstrate clinically significant improvements. Difficulties in emotion regulation have been identified as putative risk and maintaining factors for Major Depressive Disorder. Systematically enhancing adaptive emotion regulation skills should thus help reduce depressive symptom severity. However, at this point, no study has systematically evaluated effects of increasing adaptive emotion regulation skills application on symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder. In the intended study, we aim to evaluate stand-alone effects of a group-based training explicitly and exclusively targeting general emotion regulation skills on depressive symptom severity and assess whether this training augments the outcome of subsequent individual cognitive behavioral therapy for depression.