Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 30, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 29, 2022 - Jan 13, 2023
Date Accepted: May 10, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Efficacy of a single session intervention for depression in online workers: Randomized controlled trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Digital single session interventions (SSIs) have shown promise in the treatment of depression and anxiety in youth. We studied the efficacy of an SSI previously reported to be efficacious, the Common Elements Toolbox (COMET), in a large sample of adult online workers (N=828).
Objective:
To investigate the efficacy of the COMET-SSI vs. a WLC in depression and other transdiagnostic mental health outcomes.
Methods:
We conducted an investigator-blinded, pre-registered randomized controlled trial (NCT: CONCEALED FOR PEER REVIEW; pre-registration https://osf.io/63yzh) comparing the COMET-SSI to an 8-week waiting list control (WLC). Participants recruited from the online workspace Prolific were assessed for depression, anxiety, work and social functioning, psychological well-being, and emotion regulation at baseline and post-intervention at weeks 2, 4, and 8. The main outcomes were short (2-week) and longer-term (8-week) changes in depression and anxiety. The secondary outcomes were the 8-week changes in functioning, well-being, and emotion regulation. Analyses were conducted according to the intent-to-treat (ITT) principle with imputation (ITT-imputed), without imputation (ITT-unimputed), and using a per-protocol (PP) sample. Additionally, we conducted sensitivity analyses to identify inattentive responders.
Results:
The sample was 61.96% women (n = 513) with a mean age of 35.74 (SD = 11.93). Almost all of the participants met the criteria to screen for depression or anxiety on a validated screening scale. There were no statistically or clinically significant differences between the conditions in any of the outcomes at any of the time points regardless. Removing inattentive respondents did not change the pattern of results.
Conclusions:
Our results do not support the use of SSIs like COMET in online workers. Future work should explore alternative ways of intervening with online workers. Clinical Trial: Design: NCT05379881. Analyses: https://osf.io/63yzh
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.