Development of a clinician report measure to assess psychotherapy for depression in usual care settings

Although mental health policy initiatives have called for quality improvement in depression care, practical tools to describe the quality of psychotherapy for depression are not available. We developed a clinician-report measure of adherence to three types of psychotherapy for depression-cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, and psychodynamic therapy. A total of 727 clinicians from a large, national managed behavioral health care organization responded to a mail survey. The measure demonstrated good psychometric properties, including appropriate item-scale correlations, internal consistency reliability, and a three-factor structure. Our results suggest that this questionnaire may be a promising approach to describing psychotherapy for depression in usual care.