Background: Face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is effective in the management of depression symptoms in unipolar and bipolar spectrum disorders. Though, compared to electronic adaptations of CBT (eCBT), it carries several accessibility limitations. Furthermore, unlike eCBT for depression symptoms (eCBTg), eCBT specific for bipolar depression (eCBT-Bipol) remains largely understudied. Thus, supplementing this gap, this systematic review and network meta-analysis (NMA) synthesized the available literature on eCBT for the treatment of unipolar and bipolar depression symptoms.
Method: MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, EMBASE, and Cochrane were searched for relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on eCBTg and eCBT-Bipol The review followed PRISMA guidelines and used the Cochrane risk of bias tool and GRADE criteria for quality assessment. Effect sizes were summarized using standardized mean differences (SMDs) and risk ratios (RRs).
Results: eCBT-Bipol was comparable to eCBTg (SMD: 0.05, 95 % CI: -0.18; 0.28) and other psychotherapeutic interventions (SMD: 0.14, 95 % CI: -0.07; 0.35) for the management of mild to moderate depression symptoms. eCBT-Bipol was significantly more effective than attention controls (SMD: 0.35, 95 % CI: 0.11; 0.59), treatment as usual (SMD: 0.55, 95 % CI: 0.21; 0.90) and no intervention controls (SMD: 0.66, 95 % CI: 0.40; 0.93) in mitigating symptoms.
Limitations: The scarcity of eCBT-Bipol studies impacted the quality of the evidence in terms of risk of bias and imprecision.
Conclusions: The findings of this systematic review suggest that eCBT-Bipol has comparable effectiveness to eCBTg in managing depressive symptoms of unipolar and bipolar spectrum disorder. Though, they also highlighted the need for more studies on eCBT-Bipol.
Keywords: Bipolar depression; Mental health access; Online CBT; Psychotherapy.
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