According to a recent study, behavioral activation is a simple therapy that has been proven efficient and affordable for people looking to treat their depression.
Advertisement
“Our finding is the most robust evidence yet that Behavioural Activation is just as effective as CBT, meaning an effective workforce could be trained much more easily and cheaply without any compromise on the high level of quality”.
Richards suggest health systems that have shortage of psychologists to train health workers in behavioral activation to start delivering treatments to patients with depression.
In many countries, access is limited to people who can afford to pay, or those with health insurance, and waiting lists can be long, researchers said. Only about a quarter of patients in the United States have received any type of psychological therapy in the last year and 1 in 10 UK citizens have been waiting over a year to receive treatment.
The use of behavioral activation treatment could improve depression patients’ access to talk therapy treatment and reduce long waiting lists, the study authors suggested.
“Our findings challenge the dominance of CBT as the leading evidence-based psychological therapy for depression”, lead author David Richards said in a journal news release.
In the study, conducted by Edwards and a team of researchers from Exeter, Kings College London and elsewhere, investigators recruited 440 people 18 years old and up who met the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder.
They also reported similar numbers of depression free days and anxiety diagnoses, and were equally likely to experience remission.
It costs about 20 percent less than cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a talking treatment that focuses on thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, meaning it could help ease current difficulties in accessing treatment.
The depression treatment lies in the premise that the mood and behavior of people are correlated, and that increasing engagement in activities that the person finds meaningful can combat depression. Therapists help people to seek out and experience more positive situations in their lives.
He added, “In contrast, CBT is an “inside out” treatment where therapists focus on the way a person thinks”. The therapists help clients to identify and correct thoughts and believe that are not useful, including ideas about themselves, about the future or the world.
Yet until now the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has said there is insufficient evidence to recommend behavioural activation as a first-line treatment in clinical guidelines, and called for more robust research to investigate the benefits.
Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Jonathan Kanter from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Dr Ajeng Puspitasari from Indiana University, Indiana, USA, say, “Now that we have support for BA as a treatment that is clinically effective and cost-effective, we can shift our efforts to focus on what is necessary to produce sustainable large-scale BA implementation across diverse geographical and cultural settings”.
A nonmedical therapy may be as useful for depressed patients as the “gold standard” of therapy. Not insignificantly, therapy can also be expensive. “These are often activities already valued by the individual but which they’ve stopped doing due to being ill”, says Professor Richards.
The new form of therapy could be an available option for people who don’t have the financial means to sustain a complex cure.
There are around three million people suffering from depression in Britain and without ongoing treatment, four in five will relapse at some point.
Read: Homeopathy – an alternative treatment for depression?
On average, CBT cost £1,235 per participant, while BA costs £975 per head – a saving of £260 per patient.
Dr David Ekers, nurse consultant from TEWV, who led the Durham study site, said: “The practical nature of BA and the relative simplicity of delivery makes it an attractive option for NHS services”.
Advertisement
There are an bad lot of people caught in that terrible spiral: According to research by the World Economic Forum, an estimated 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression, with a projected global cost approaching $5.4 trillion over the 20-year period from 2011 to 2030.
