Change in Satisfaction With Social Support as a Common Outcome in Interpersonal Psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression

As facets of social support can correlate positively with depressive symptoms, it follows that increases in such support are a clinically pertinent proximal outcome in depression-focused therapies. Yet, most research on social support subtypes in psychotherapy has treated them as statically assessed predictors of other therapy outcomes and has largely neglected to examine the degree to which they change over treatment. Addressing this gap, some work has shown that one subtype-patients' subjective satisfaction with social support (SSS)-improves across interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for depression, which is an evidence-based treatment that foundationally targets social support elements. However, it remains uncertain whether SSS improvement is specific to IPT, or whether it also occurs in other evidence-based treatments for which a social support focus is less foundational (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT]). Accordingly, we (a) tested the association between lower SSS and depression at pretreatment, (b) explored whether SSS improved across both IPT and CBT, and (c) explored whether such improvement was more pronounced in IPT than CBT. Adult outpatients were randomized to 16 weeks of IPT (n = 39) or CBT (n = 41) and rated SSS and depression at baseline and SSS repeatedly through treatment. As expected, SSS was negatively correlated with depression at baseline, further establishing SSS as a clinically relevant outcome. Additionally, based on multilevel modeling, patients demonstrated significant improvement in SSS across both treatments, but showed no difference between them in the degree of change. These results indicate that SSS can change comparably in distinctly different depression-focused psychotherapies.