Measurement-Based Care Vs. Standard Care for Major Depressive Disorder

Hypothesis: The rates of response and remission, and time to response and remission would be significantly shorter in the MBC group, without greater dropout rates and side effect burden, compared with the standard treatment group. Study design and setting This will be a multi-centre, with assessors blind to protocol and treatment group, parallel arm, randomized controlled trial (RCT). The study is a direct replication of a study conducted by Gou et al. (2015) in China. Participants Participants will be recruited from psychiatric units of teaching and non-teaching hospitals in 6 centres: Karachi (population 23 million), Lahore (population 10 million), Rawalpindi (population 3 million), Hyderabad (population 2 million) and Quetta (population 1 million) and Multan (1.8 million). Sample size The sample size of 120 participants for this exploratory trial is based on the study conducted by Guo et al.