Psychosocial remediation in depressive disorders: A systematic review

Social functioning impairment has been described in several psychiatric illness, including depressive disorders. It is associated with a deterioration in global functioning and quality of life, thus there is a growing interest in psychosocial functioning remediation interventions. This systematic review aims to review all psychotherapeutic, pharmacological and biological social functioning interventions in depressive disorders.

A systematic search was conducted on PubMed, PsycINFO and Scopus from the first articles to 2019 following the PRISMA guidelines. 72 original papers were extracted from an initial number of 1827, based on the selected eligibility criteria.

A growing body of research was observed in the last 10 years, with most studies showing a low level of scientific evidence. The main diagnosis found was major depressive disorder and the principal social cognition domains assessed were emotional processing and attributional style. The type of intervention most found was the pharmacological one, followed by psychotherapeutic interventions classified as "non-specific. The efficacy of treatments showed an improvement in depressive symptoms and positive results for emotional processing and attributional style.

Because there is a lack of well-controlled designs and really few interventions focusing on its remediation, and low homogeneity on the assessment of social aspects across, a comparison of results and the extraction of general conclusions is quite difficult.

Although a promising body of literature has been developed in recent years on the improvement of psychosocial functioning in patients with depressive disorders, more studies are needed to clarify relevant aspects in this area.