CInterpretation
The population-wide implementation of psychological treatments into primary care, when compared with pharmacotherapy, is associated with considerably larger challenges. Before effective psychological care can be delivered, a sufficient number of qualified clinicians must be integrated into primary care on a countrywide level. It is of major interest, therefore, that remote, reduced, or minimal-contact CBT-based interventions and intense, face-to-face treatments seem to be similarly effective. This finding should be interpreted carefully, however, given the limited number and moderate size of the identified studies. Other major meta-analyses did not investigate the influence of different delivery modalities as we did. They also, surprisingly, did not find an influence of treatment dose.8,15
We hypothesize 2 possible explanations. First, more-intense treatment might indeed not be superior to less-intense treatment. There is some evidence from naturalistic studies indicating that the relationship between treatment dose and response is highly variable31 and that a relevant proportion of patients already improves significantly after few sessions.32 Another study, however, found that response rates were low in patient samples receiving only a few sessions.33 Second, trials testing a certain treatment delivery mode might be more likely to recruit participants who are motivated to use that delivery mode specifically. For example, patients preferring face-to-face psychotherapy might be less likely to embark on and comply with a no/minimal-contact treatment (and vice versa). Furthermore, clinical characteristics are also likely to be associated with the mode of treatment delivery. For example, in our trial set, studies limited to patients with major depressive disorders were more likely to investigate a face-to-face intervention. Thus, our findings might indicate less that all treatment delivery modes are similarly effective but rather that they can be similarly effective when applied in motivated and indicated target groups. For successful implementation of psychological treatments in primary health care, it might be desirable that several different options (eg, face-to-face, guided self-help, and minimal contact) are available.