Letting in the light: Development and evaluation of Augmented Depression Therapy (ADepT) to build positive affect in depression

The two cardinal symptoms of depression are heightened negative affect (NA) and diminished positive affect (PA). Existing psychosocial treatments for depression focus on reducing NA but arguably neglect increasing PA, which may contribute to sub-optimal treatment outcomes. This talk will present the rationale as to why targeting PA may be helpful, report secondary analyses of RCTs evaluating how well existing treatments repair PA, present findings from basic science work evaluating what mechanisms lead to blunted PA, and describe the development and preliminary evaluation of Augmented Depression Therapy (ADepT) to target PA. In particular clinical and health economic findings from a recent pilot randomized controlled trial (trial registration; ISCRTN85278228) will be presented, where 82 depressed patients were randomized to individual face-to-face ADepT (15 acute and 5 booster sessions) or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT; 20 acute sessions) and followed up over an 18m period.