Samenvatting

Research on psychological treatment of depression in inpatients is not conclusive,with some studies finding clear
positive effects and other studies finding no significant benefit compared to usual care or structured
pharmacotherapy. The results of a meta-analysis investigating how effective psychological treatment is for
depressed inpatients are presented. A systematic search in bibliographical databases resulted in 12 studieswith a
total of 570 respondents. This set of studies had sufficient statistical power to detect small effect sizes.
Psychological treatments had a small (g=0.29), but statistically significant additional effect on depression
compared to usual care and structured pharmacological treatments only. This corresponded with a numbersneeded-
to-be-treated of 6.17. Heterogeneity was zero inmost analyses, and not significant in all analyses. There
wasno indication for significant publication bias. Effectswere not associatedwith characteristics of the population,
the interventions and the design of the studies. Although the number of studieswas small, and the quality ofmany
studieswas not optimal, it seems safe to conclude that psychological treatments have a small but robust effect on
depression in depressed inpatients. More high-quality research is needed to verify these results.