Cognitive Therapy in Depression (Paperback) | Released: 07 Apr 2021

From 1998 in GGZ Delfland (Circuit Adults Short- Treatment) patients with depression treated according to the interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) treatment protocol. As a group psychotherapist I saw it as a challenge to apply this individual psychotherapy in an outpatient group (IPT-G). The first IPT-G was started in 2000. The Dutch variant on the group model of Wil fl ey, MacKenzie, Welch, Ayres and Weissman (2000) has been developed while working. The four focuses of the IPT have been applied in an outpatient short-term group therapy for the treatment of adult patients with depression.This book is a continuation of the article: 'Interpersonal psychotherapy in an outpatient group' (Snippe, 2003), after nine years of experience with this form of group psychotherapy and the systematic administration of questionnaires from the participants.The changes in the treatment protocol are partly due to the critical questions of the participants in the courses about IPT-G. The discussions with enthusiastic supervisees, with whom I have often watched group session DVDs, have also made a valuable contribution to the revision of the treatment protocol. Speci-I would like to mention the supervisees of the Depression Department of PsyQ, The Hague for their willingness to administer the pilot study questionnaires to their patients.It has been decided not to describe an IPT-G treatment protocol per session, as has become common practice in some forms of psychotherapy.A protocol per session is established in such a way that the freedom of patients to respond to each other is limited and the group dynamic process can become insufficiently visible.My thanks go to Marc Blom, psychiatrist, for his comments on the IPT part in this book. As a trainer, he, together with Kosse Jonker, clinical psychologist, has put IPT on the map in the Netherlands.I would also like to thank Hans Snijders, clinical psychologist and group dynamics educator, for his very useful commentary on the group therapeutic part of the book.I would also like to thank all those who have worked with me as a co-therapist: GZ psychologists and physician assistants in training at GGZ DelflandIPT is a short-term individual psychotherapy developed for the outpatient treatment of depressed patients. The method was first published by Klerman, Weissman, Rounsaville and Chevron (1984).IPT has been conceived as a practical approach to psychotherapy for acute depression. IPT is (almost) atheoretical in design. Klerman and Weissman's group looked at what was known at the time about the (psychotherapeutic) treatment of depression. These components have been merged to form IPT. IPT was then recorded in a protocol so that it could be transferred to other therapists and tested empirically. IPT was thus one of the treatments that set a new trend in research into the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Because IPT meets the criteria for evidence-based treatment (transferable, studied in one or more randomized treatment studies), it was quickly included in the guidelines for the treatment of depression. IPT was then used in patients with other psychiatric illnesses. Adapted protocols have been developed for bipolar disorders (Frank et al, 2005) and dysthymia (Markowitz, 1998), among others. Furthermore, IPT proved to be an effective treatment method forthe treatment of depression in different age groups such as adolescents (Mufson, Dorta, Moreau & Weissman, 2004) and the elderly (Hinrichsen & Clougherty, 2006).There is also an IPT treatment protocol in the Netherlands (Blom, 1997) and IPT has been investigated in various places (Blom et al., 2007; Van Schaik et al., 2006).Some studies of IPT-G in the treatment of depression are known. Levkovitz et al. (2000) conclude that IPT-G is effective for some of the patients studied with a depressive disorder after they had been treated with antidepressants in the acute phase.