Effectiveness of group training of dialectical behavior therapy on emotion regulation in depressive girls

Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of dialectical behavior therapy training in emotion regulation of female students with depression.

This study was a clinical trial with pre-test, post-test, and 2-month follow-up on 24 female students. The sampling method was Purposeful, for this goal a call to second-level secondary school counselors was sent to refer a student to the girl studying in the second and third bases, suspected of being depressed. Among female students referred to the Counseling Center of Education Mistry of Lahijan City 24 subjects with depressive disorder were selected and they were assigned randomly into control and experimental groups using the Beck Depression Inventory II and the Structured Clinical Interview SCID. To collect data, the scale of emotional regulation of Gratz and Roemer (DERS) was used. The experimental group got 14 sessions of dialectic behavioral therapy group training and the control group was recorded on the waiting list. For data analysis, SPSS software, version 22, descriptive statistics, and repeated measure ANOVA were used.

Results showed that there is significant difference between mean scores of emotional regulation difficulty in depressed girls who received dialectical behavior therapy training and the mean scores of emotional regulation difficulty in depressed girls who did not received this training (P<0.05).

It seems that dialectical behavior therapy training leads to significant and lasting reduction in in emotional regulation difficulties in depressed people.