Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jan 26, 2022
Date Accepted: Nov 16, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
What patients and therapists expect in a blended cognitive behavioral therapy (bCBT) program for depression?: Results from a formative qualitative study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Blended cognitive behavioral therapy (bCBT)—the combination of digital elements and face-to-face psychotherapy—has been proposed to alleviate challenges patients and therapists face in conventional CBT. There is growing evidence that adding digital elements to face-to-face psychotherapy can contribute to better treatment outcomes. However, bCBT programs still show considerable shortcomings and knowledge on how to improve digital applications using a bCBT protocol is limited.
Objective:
This study aims to inductively identify functions and qualities that are expected from a bCBT treatment for depression in the eyes of patients and psychotherapists who were not currently receiving or practicing bCBT treatment.
Methods:
We employed a qualitative exploratory study design and conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 psychotherapists as well as 11 patients with a primary diagnosis of depression and currently undergoing CBT treatment. Themes and categories were established inductively from transcribed interview records based on a rigorous coding method.
Results:
Both therapists and patients expected a digital application to provide patients the opportunity to track their mood, work on therapeutic homework activities, easily access an intervention set for harder moments and efficiently facilitate administrative tasks. The desire to be able to customize bCBT protocols to individual patient circumstances was evident in both patient and therapist interviews. Patients differed with respect to what content and the amount of material the app should focus on as well as the method of recording experiences. Therapists viewed digital applications as potentially aiding in their documentation work outside of sessions. Different attitudes surfaced on the topic of data security, with patients not as concerned as therapists.
Conclusions:
Both patients and therapists had substantially positive attitudes towards the option of an integrated bCBT treatment. Our study presents novel findings on the expectations and attitudes of patients and therapists.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.