Chronic depression is a highly prevalent disorder, but despite high distress neglected in mental health care.  Chronic depression denotes that, throughout a timespan of at least two years, the affected person constantly feels dejected or unmotivated. Further characteristics of depression are exhaustion, sleep and concentration disorder, as well as feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness. Affected people feel strong emotional distress, which often puts significant weight on partnership, social life or work life. Even under medical treatment, in many cases the symptoms are not alleviated sufficiently.

The effectiveness and acceptance of pharmacological treatment is often limited. Thus, there is urgent need for psychological treatment options as an alternative. Besides positive results of interpersonal treatment approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy, there is also preliminary evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Based on this approach, we developed a group meditation program that combined mindfulness with metta meditation.

Metta-Meditation, which is rooted in Buddhism, has the specific aim to enhance a positive attitude towards oneself and others. Metta is a notion of kindness, active interest in others, love, friendship or sympathy. This kind of benevolent attitude can be trained through meditation techniques. We assume that benevolence can be established through the combination of Metta-Meditation and behavioral activation.  This approach already obtained promising results in pilot studies and is supposed to be explored further in this current study.  

In two pilot studies, we observed preliminary positive effects on symptoms (Graser et al., 2016; Hofmann et al., 2015).  The implementation of these interventions into daily life is complicated by intense withdrawal and avoidance. However, the positive outcome of a former RCT of Cognitive Therapy for recurrent depression (Stangier et al., 2013) as well as from unpublished cases indicate that CBT in individual setting compensate for the shortcomings of the group mediation program and significantly contribute to the reduction of depression-prone behavior.

For the results of the recently finished randomized controlled trial, see Manuscript preprint

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Stangier