Active clinical trials for "Depressive Disorder"

200 persons with depression are recruited via internet depression forums devoted to depression and are randomly assigned either to the online program deprexis or to a wait-list control condition. All participants receive free-of-charge online access to deprexis either immediately or with an eight week delay. Prior to intervention and eight weeks later, both groups are assessed via an anonymous online survey which was implemented using the software package OPST®. The survey consists of different questionnaires. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) represents the primary outcome. It is assumed that the severity of depressive symptoms will improve to a significantly greater extent in the deprexis than in the wait-list control condition in the course of eight weeks.

The investigators are adapting Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT-A) for adolescents who are referred to emergency services either for a suicide attempt or for being evaluated as high risk for suicidal behavior. The investigators will recruit 15 adolescents ages 12-19 years who present with a diagnosis of major depression, dysthymic disorder, depression disorder not otherwise specified who have a history of a suicide attempt in the past 2 months or a non-medically lethal attempt that may require psychiatric hospitalization, suicide attempt that is or report current suicidal ideation with a plan/intent, and treat them in an open clinical trial. The treatment will be conducted twice weekly for the first 8 weeks of treatment and then weekly for the remaining 12 weeks of the study. Using feedback from clinicians and participants, the investigators will make further modifications to the manual in preparation for conducting a larger controlled clinical trial.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common psychiatric illness with high cost to society and individual patients. One reason for the high cost is that most patients endure lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful empiric antidepressant trials before a successful medication is identified by trial-and-error. Care would be improved if a biomarker could determine, early in the course of treatment, whether a particular antidepressant would likely lead to response, remission, or treatment failure. Physicians could rapidly change treatments to an antidepressant which the biomarker indicated would be likely to help the patient. We have identified quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG) changes that emerge early in the course of treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that appear to predict later response and remission in a general adult patient population. Demographic trends in the United States suggest that improved care for MDD will be essential for a growing number of elderly with late-life depression. While the consequences of prolonged trial-and-error periods to find a successful treatment are particularly inauspicious for elders with late-life depression, this patient group has not been included in the past studies which demonstrated the use of this biomarker approach in a general adult population. We propose a 12-week treatment trial to evaluate a practical biomarker for predicting outcome based on data from the first week of antidepressant treatment, with a focus only on depression in late life (age ≥65). There are three study Hypothesis: H1) ATR prediction of treatment outcome in older subjects will show >70% accuracy. H2) The predictive accuracy of the model will be enhanced by including clinical, socio-demographic, and genetic predictors. H3) The accuracy of ATR prediction will not show a significant dependence on subject gender.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between brain electrical activity in elderly depressed patients and response to antidepressant medication treatment. Elderly patients with depression will be treated for 12 weeks with an antidepressant medication commonly used in clinical practice called escitalopram (Lexapro). Brain electrical activity will be assessed using electrophysiological tests. Researchers are interested in whether the brain electrical activity of elderly people with depression before they start the medication can tell us who amongst them will improve with antidepressant treatment and to what extent. They will also determine whether patients' brain electrical activity during the 12 weeks of medication treatment will change in any way and whether this change will be linked with a change in the severity of their depression. Researchers hope that information gained from this study will help to better understand the brain processes associated with depression and its successful treatment.

This will be an open label study of escitalopram. Patients not responsive to citalopram will be switched directly to escitalopram. Patients will receive escalating doses of escitalopram up to a maximum of 50 mg until they either achieve remission (MADRS <9) or fail to tolerate the dose.

The purpose of this study is to assess whether duloxetine is superior to placebo in the treatment of children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD)

The purpose of this study is to assess whether duloxetine is superior to placebo in the treatment of children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD)

The purpose of this study is to determine the usefulness of a stress reduction treatment in helping minority patients with major depression get better. Subjects will receive six weeks of either mindfulness-based stress reduction and problem solving therapy or psychoeducation.

The study evaluates three best-practice care pathways for postnatal depression (PND) by comparing sole General Practitioner (GP) management to GP management in combination with CBT-based counselling from either a Psychologist or a Maternal and Child Health Nurse (MCHN).

Depression is frequently accompanied by a specific sad facial expression. This expression is in part mediated by the same muscle activity that produces frown lines. Based on the assumption that there is a positive feedback between depressed mood and the correspondent facial muscle activity (facial feedback) the investigators will conduct a randomized controlled pilot study in which the investigators will apply a classical cosmetic treatment of frown lines with injections of botulinum toxin to depressed patients who did not sufficiently respond to antidepressant medication. The investigators hypothesize that this treatment will contribute to the amelioration of depressive symptoms in these patients. This hypothesis is supported by a previous open case series in which remission of depression was reported after such treatment (Finzi and Wasserman, 2006).