Mathias Harrer

Nice overview in World Psychiatry by @pimcuijpers.bsky.social @toshi-frkw.bsky.social and @mathiasharrer.bsky.social

No innovation in the treatment of depression will be a ’silver bullet’ that will dramatically change the outcomes. Only together can innovations really improve outcomes. Read our new paper in the Br J Psychiatry. With @mathiasharrer.bsky.social and @toshi-frkw.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1192/bjp....

Psychological internet interventions are effective in people suffering from depressive symptoms who do not meet criteria for depression yet. Particularly for those with at least moderate symptom severity @mathiasharrer.bsky.social @toshi-frkw.bsky.social

bit.ly/4kcYMxS

Delivery formats of cognitive behavior therapy in adults with eating disorders: a network meta-analysis Although CBT has been found to be effective in the treatment of eating disorders, it is not clear if there are differences between treatment formats. We conducted a network meta-analysis (NMA) of r...

Our new network meta-analysis of treatment formats in CBT for eating disorders found no significant difference between individual, group, guided self-help and unguided self, and all were effective. With @mathiasharrer.bsky.social, @claramiguel.bsky.social and others
doi.org/10.1080/1650...

Cognitive behavioral therapy skills via a smartphone app for subthreshold depression among adults in the community: the RESiLIENT randomized controlled trial - Nature Medicine A trial that used a master randomized design found that the skills commonly found in smartphone-based cognitive behavioral therapy, when tested alone or in combination with behavioral activation, were...

Published today in Nature Medicine. In one of the world’s largest RCTs of its kind (n=3,936), a smartphone app teaching 5 key cognitive-behavioral therapy skills improved subthreshold depression—and the effects lasted 6 months.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Mental Disorders in Adults This unified series of meta-analyses examines the effect sizes of cognitive behavior therapy for many mental and eating disorders on symptoms of the respective disorders using uniform methodologies fo...

Pim Cuijpers and the team has published a comprehensive meta-analysis of CBT for 12 mental disorders, from psychosis to depression to specific phobia. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
@pimcuijpers.bsky.social @mathiasharrer.bsky.social @claramiguel.bsky.social

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Mental Disorders in Adults This unified series of meta-analyses examines the effect sizes of cognitive behavior therapy for many mental and eating disorders on symptoms of the respective disorders using uniform methodologies fo...

Today our new unified series of meta-analyses of CBT for 11 mental disorders was published in JAMA Psychiatry. Another nice example of a 'next level' meta-analysis of the Metapsy initiative. With @mathiasharrer.bsky.social, @claramiguel.bsky.social, and many others
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

@eikofried.bsky.social @ploederl.bsky.social FYI, as promised :)

Our new paper on self-reports vs clinician ratings of efficacies of psychotherapies for depression can be read open-access in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences!

Here is a short summary of our findings🧵
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

One could say that the research field on prevention of depression is stuck. Interested in this field and in solutions how to continue? Read my new open access paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science
doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Starting my job search: I just finished my PhD in Clinical Psychology and am looking for opportunities to make an impact.

I have expertise in meta-analyses, advanced stats, psychometrics, R, and project management.

If you know of a position that might be a great fit, please feel free to reach out.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the one and only Pim Cuijpers and Toshi Furukawa are now on Bluesky as well! :)

@pimcuijpers.bsky.social
@toshi-frkw.bsky.social

#PsychSciSky #psychiatry #statssky #psychsky

Great list @floriannaudet.bsky.social! Is it possible to be added?

What if we wait? Using synthetic waiting lists to estimate treatment effects in routine outcome data Objective: Due to the lack of randomization, pre–post routine outcome data precludes causal conclusions. We propose the “synthetic waiting list” (SWL) control group to overcome this limitation.Meth...

In "What if we wait? Using synthetic waiting lists to estimate treatment effects in routine outcome data", we demonstrated how to estimate putative between-group effects from data sets with only within-subjects measurements. Basically a g-estimation approach.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Society for Research Synthesis Methodology The Society for Research Synthesis Methodology (SRSM) is an organization of scholars and practitioners interested in the development and application of research synthesis methodology. This website ser...

Question for my #EvidenceSynthesis #MetaAnalysis #SystematicReview folks:

I'm organizing the 2025 meeting of the Society for Research Synthesis Methods (www.srsm.org). Currently working on the call for submissions, which it has me dreaming about sessions I would love to see at the conference....

This correlation can also have quite a big impact in meta-analysis, because some use change scores, others endpoint scores for their SMD (latter is preferable IMO).

We did a study calculating divergences between the two in PT & ADM trials depending on the "imputed" correlation. (under review).

Combining endpoint and change data did not affect the summary standardised mean difference in pairwise and network meta‐analyses: An empirical study in depression When studies use different scales to measure continuous outcomes, standardised mean differences (SMD) are required to meta-analyse the data. However, outcomes are often reported as endpoint or change...

This is a common limitation. At least in psychotherapy trials, those pre-post correlations are hardly ever reported.

Edoardo Ostinelli & team extracted pre-post correlations from IPD in this paper onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... (supply. 3.0.0).

Median for ADM was ~.3, ~.4 for iCBT

Read our new article just published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Thanks to everyone involved in the IPD-PrevDep Consortium \w Claudia Buntrock, @pimcuijpers.bsky.social, @toshi-frkw.bsky.social, and so many more.

Okay made a starter pack for folks into evidence synthesis, systematic review, meta-analysis. I've surely missed people, so please ping with suggestions or self-nominations.
go.bsky.app/JLw77VZ

Digital interventions are attractive to increase treatment uptake in depression, but we also need to know who requires other forms of care.

Here, we use meta-analytic predictive models to derive a precision treatment rule for digital stress interventions in Px with depression. bit.ly/3S9V6Sq

A highly relevant insight, especially for psychotherapy trialists 👇

A graph showing the predicted studies published per year in depression psychotherapy research. It shows an overall increase in publication rates over the last 50 years, with cognitive behavioral treatment studies rising particularly fast.

New paper on five decades of depression psychotherapy research in the American Psychologist (led by Pim Cuijpers): doi.org/10.1037/amp0...

We found CBT is not only by far the best-examined therapy, but that the share of CBT among all published trials is increasing with every year.

"For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. The experimental method makes us think we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by."

Great paper on W.'s mysterious remark: jhaponline.org/jhap/article...

Belated Halloween greetings from your friend trained in biostatistics.

Very nice! @mathiasharrer.bsky.social et al.'s metapsy now has a data base of PTSD studies: www.metapsy.org/database/ptsd

The major problem with correlations applied to research data is that they can not provide useful information on causal strength because they change with the degree of variability of the variables they relate. Causality operates on single instances, not on populations whose members vary. The effect of A on B for me can hardly depend on whether I'm in a group that varies greatly in A or another that does not vary at all.

It is not an accident that causal modeling proceeds with regression and not correlation coefficients. In the same vein, I should note that standardized effect size measures, such as d and / developed in power analysis (Cohen, 1988) are, like correlations, also dependent on population variability of the dependent variable and are properly used only when that fact is kept in mind .

From Cohen's "The Earth is Round". The paper is famous, and I wonder why that particular part often gets neglected.
bookdown.org/MathiasHarre...

Will do!

Indeed. We are currently working on an update of that MA, and the findings seem to remain largely the same 13 years later. If you control for blinding, the effect difference between self-rep and clinical becomes smaller (Δg <.10, but still "favoring" clinicians).