Inpatient psychotherapy for depression in a large routine clinical care sample: A Bayesian approach to examining clinical outcomes and predictors of change

J Affect Disord. 2022 May 15:305:133-143. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.02.057. Epub 2022 Feb 25.

Abstract

Background: A routinely collected dataset was analyzed (1) to determine the naturalistic effectiveness of inpatient psychotherapy for depression in routine psychotherapeutic care, and (2) to identify potential predictors of change.

Methods: In a sample of 22,681 inpatients with depression, pre-post and pre-follow-up effect sizes were computed for various outcome variables. To build a probabilistic model of predictors of change, an independent component analysis generated components from demographic and clinical data, and Bayesian EFA extracted factors from the available pre-test, post-test and follow-up questionnaires in a subsample (N = 6377). To select the best-fitted model, the BIC of different path models were compared. A Bayesian path analysis was performed to identify the most important factors to predict changes.

Results: Effect sizes were large for the primary outcome and moderate for various secondary outcomes. Almost all pretreatment factors exerted significant influences on different baseline factors. Several factors were found to be resistant to change during treatment: suicidality, agoraphobia, life dissatisfaction, physical disability and pain. The strongest cross-loadings were observed from suicidality on negative cognitions, from agoraphobia on anxiety, and from physical disability on perceived disability.

Limitations: No causal conclusions can be drawn directly from our results as we only used cross-lagged panel data without control group.

Conclusions: The results indicate large effects of inpatient psychotherapy for depression in routine clinical care. The direct influence of pretreatment factors decreased over the course of treatment. However, some factors appeared stable and difficult to treat, which might hinder treatment outcome. Findings of different predictors of change are discussed.

Keywords: Depression; Effectiveness; Prediction; Predictors of change; Routine clinical care.

MeSH terms

  • Anxiety Disorders
  • Bayes Theorem
  • Depression* / therapy
  • Humans
  • Inpatients*
  • Psychotherapy / methods
  • Treatment Outcome