Psychotherapeutic Text Messaging for Depression Pilot Study
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02872454. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Major depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States and is a major contributor to suicide, a leading cause of premature death. The majority of individuals with depression do not receive adequate pharmacologic or psychotherapeutic treatment due to difficulty accessing services or stopping treatment due to side effects, non-response, or the stigma associated with attending mental health clinic visits. Mobile health information technology services, such as text messaging, have the potential to provide effective self-management support for depression to nearly every adult in the US with depression. Guided self-help via text messaging has been shown to be effective for improving a range of health behaviors as well as symptoms of depression. However, previously studied depression text messaging services have not utilized the breadth of psychotherapeutic techniques shown to be effective for depression nor have they attempted to tailor the psychotherapeutic content to the individual in order to improve acceptability and outcomes. Advanced artificial intelligence methods (e.g., reinforcement learning) offers the capability to weed out ineffective messages and to target messages to individuals in order to substantially improve program effectiveness. This pilot study is the first step in towards developing an artificially intelligent text message service for depression. The specific aims of the study are to: 1) demonstrate the feasibility of recruiting and enrolling participants from the general population of US adults and delivering a text-messaging intervention for depression, 2) determine whether there are differences in the perceived helpfulness of messages derived from different psychotherapeutic treatment modalities, and whether these differences are moderated by participant characteristics (e.g., age, gender, depression symptom severity), 3) determine whether messages derived from different psychotherapeutic treatment modalities or their perceived helpfulness are associated with changes in depression symptoms, and whether these relationships are moderated by participant characteristics.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT02872454
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 190 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Mar 31, 2015
- Primary completion
- Mar 31, 2016
- Completion
- Mar 31, 2016
- Last update posted
- Aug 18, 2016
2015 – 2016
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Michigan Inpatient Psychiatry Unit | Ann Arbor | Michigan | 48109 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02872454, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Aug 18, 2016 · Synced Sep 8, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT02872454 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.