Doing more of what you enjoy: a simple therapy for depression holds up across 105 trials
Behavioral activation — a therapy that helps people slowly return to activities they find useful or enjoyable — clearly reduces depression. Researchers pooled 105 trials covering 13,933 patients and found a moderate-to-large benefit lasting up to a year.
Why it matters
Depression is common everywhere, and trained therapists are scarce and expensive in most of the world. This therapy is simple: instead of digging into thoughts, it helps a person plan and do small activities again, step by step. Because it is simple, it can be taught quickly, and it still helped when people worked through it on their own, though the effect was smaller. One honest caution: the trials disagreed with each other quite a lot, and many compared the therapy against people waiting for treatment, which tends to make any treatment look better than it would against real alternatives.
Who's behind it: Pim Cuijpers and colleagues, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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