Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral to Hypnotherapeutic Treatment of Depression

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is considered to be an effective psychological treatment of mild to moderate Major Depressive Episodes. Effective treatments, however, show a reduction of depressive symptoms only up to 50 % (Luty et al., 2007) which is one reason for the modification of the well-established CBT in the last years. Following the 'third wave' approaches of CBT, e.g. Emotion-Focussed Therapy or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, techniques like meditation or the use of systemic or Gestalt techniques within CBT has been applied. Within this context, Hypnotherapy-based strategies can also show an improvement of the current state of the art in depression psychotherapy. However, only few studies conducted randomised controlled trials to study the efficacy of hypnosis for depression as e.g. the comparison of cognitive hypnotherapy to CBT-alone (e.g. Alladin and Alibhai, 2007). With the present study, the efficacy of the Hypnotherapeutic Treatment of Depression (HDT) will be compared to the CBT-based Activation-focussed Cognitive Treatment of Depression (ACDT). Both treatments are individually administered and includes 20 sessions. We expect HDT not being inferior to ACDT in the reduction of depressive symptoms after six months of treatment.