Indirect Treatment of Depression🔗

The following article is entitled “Are Web-Based Stress Management Interventions Effective as an Indirect Treatment of Depression? An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis of Six Randomized Trials.” This paper reports the results of an IPD-MA in which we synthesize the effects of a digital stress intervention (“Get.On Fit im Stress”) in patients with clinically relevant depressive symptoms. The primary outcome of this analysis was depressive symptom severity, which was examined to confirm if stress interventions can be used as an “indirect treatment” of depression. Moderate-to-large effects on this outcome emerged at post-test and 3-month follow-up, comparable to “bona fide” psychotherapies. Using network IPD-MA, we found tentative evidence that human guidance increases the intervention effect. This paper lays the groundwork for Article 3, in which a meta-analytic prediction model is developed for the same stress intervention.

Article 2 has been published in “BMJ Mental Health” (Harrer, Nixon, et al., 2024). The contents in the article presented below are identical to the published version in the journal.