A Narrative Review on Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Patients with Depressive Difficulties

Abstract

Background: Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that was earlier intended to treat only patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD), but researchers have found DBT to treat several psychological disorders, including depression. Aim: The article aims to review the clinical shreds of evidence regarding the use of DBT to treat depression. Methods: PubMed literature search was done by applying the year filter range, 2010 to 2021. Another filter applied was “Randomized controlled trial”, so that the strength of evidence could be enhanced. The keywords used were “Dialectical Behavior Therapy” AND “Depression”. Results: 33 articles were found, out of which only 20 relevant articles were reviewed. DBT was found to alleviate depressive symptoms associated with different psychological disorders like bipolar disorder and BPD but the number of studies that validated the aforementioned were less than those studies which showed that DBT had no significant effect on the patients with depressive difficulties. The long-term effect of DBT for treating depression is under suspect, as studies showed that DBT got ineffective during the follow-ups. Conclusion: DBT shows benefits in depression, but further studies are still required to validate this concretely as DBT did not show a significant effect when compared to its control counterparts. There is much need for future studies which can evaluate the long-term efficacy of DBT in depression, which is another challenging area because follow-up data did not favor DBT.