Testing the effectiveness of behavioral activation therapy in the treatment of acute unipolar depression

The present study sought to investigate the clinical effectiveness of Behavioral Activation (BA) Therapy, the behavioral activation component of Beck's Cognitive Therapy (CT; Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). Seventeen adults seeking mental health services for Unipolar Depression were recruited from the Kalamazoo and Southwestern Michigan regions. All participants were randomly assigned to either (a) an Immediate Treatment Group, or (b) a waitlist control group, while both received 10 weeks of BA therapy. Depressive symptomatology for both conditions were assessed at pretreatment, post-treatment, and 3-month follow-up with the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, Ball, & Ranieri, 1996), the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV-Non-Patient Version (SCID; First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1997), and the Revised Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (RHRSD; Warren, 1996). It was hypothesized that at the completion of treatment, participants in both the immediate treatment and waitlist conditions would be significantly less depressed both on a self-report measure and on clinician ratings of severity of depression. It was further hypothesized that the waitlist participants would show no significant change during the waitlist period.