Background: The group-based CBT intervention, the Adolescent Coping with Depression Course (ACDC), has previously\nbeen evaluated within a quasi-experimental design, showing reduction in depressive symptoms compared to a\nbenchmark of similar studies. The aim of our study was to investigate the effectiveness of ACDC within a randomized\ncontrolled (RCT) design.\nMethod: Thirty-five course/control leaders randomly assigned to provide ACDC or usual care (UC) recruited 133\nadolescents allocated to ACDC and 95 to UC. ACDC participants received eight weekly sessions and two followup\nsessions about 3 and 6 weeks after the last session. UC participants received usual care as implemented at the\ndifferent sites. Depressive symptoms were measured with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale\nfor adolescents (CES-D), perfectionism with the revised version of the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS), and\nrumination with the revised version of the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS). Attrition was considered missing at\nrandom (MAR) and handled with a full information maximum likelihood (FIML) procedure.\nResults: Intention to treat analysis (ITT), including baseline scores and predictors of missing data as control or\nauxiliary variables, showed a small to medium reduction in depressive symptoms for the ACDC group compared\nto UC (d = -.31). Changes in perfectionism and rumination in favor of the intervention were also significant.\nSensitivity analyses confirmed the findings from the ITT analyses.\nConclusions: The current study supports the effectiveness of this group-based CBT intervention. The intervention can\nhopefully result in clinically significant reductions in symptoms associated with depression among adolescents.
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