Depression can have a severe negative impact on the non-patient spouses and on marital functioning, which in turn can exacerbate or maintain the depressed partner's symptoms. This suggests that intervention with the spouses can potentially help their partner's depression and reduce their own psychological distress. Although there are well-validated interventions that address the interpersonal nature of depression (e.g., martial therapy and interpersonal therapy), these treatments are often too lengthy and broad in focus. Alternatively, brief psycho educational approaches have been successfully applied to spousal populations coping with various other illnesses in their partners (e.g., alcoholism, cancer, and HIV/AIDS). The proposed study will be among the few to develop and test the efficacy of a brief psycho educational intervention for the spouses of depressed individuals, using a sample of depressed primary care patients. The goals are: (1) to develop a spouse psycho educational intervention that reduces the depressed partner's symptomatology as a result of changes made by the spouse in understanding and better coping with the depression, (2) to develop an intervention that reduces the psychological distress and burden experienced by spouses of depressed individuals themselves, and (3) to explore the applicability of this spouse intervention within a primary care population, specifically as an adjunct treatment to physicians' usual care in treating depressed patients.
| Cohen, Shiri; O'Leary, K Daniel; Foran, Heather (2010) A randomized clinical trial of a brief, problem-focused couple therapy for depression. Behav Ther 41:433-46 |
