Assessment and screening
anxiety disorder, mood disorders, depressive disorder, depressive, psychiatric, depressive symptoms, T2DM, diabetes distress
SCID
A clinical psychologists conducted in-depth clinical interviews with patients in one-on-one settings. In the interview, the central focus was given to exploring the current presenting complaints, duration of illness, nature of the problems, and symptoms severity in terms of psychiatric problems. In order to cross check, the symptoms severity baseline measures, i.e., DDS (for diabetes distress) and PHQ (for depressive symptoms severity) were administered. Moreover, patients under treatment and experiencing T2DM for the last 6 months and experiencing depressive symptoms more than 2 weeks were selected for this RCT. Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnosis (SCID) was used to screen out any patients suffering from major depressive disorder, persistent mood disorders and health anxiety disorder and such patients were excluded. They were excluded from this RCT because they were referred for further psychological evaluation and treatment (i.e., psychiatric medication if need and extensive psychotherapy along with T2DM treatment). Furthermore, participants who achieved mean item score of 3 or above (moderate distress) on DDS and were belonging to mild depressive symptoms category or higher on PHQ were considered eligible for this RCT because they had diabetes distress and depressive symptoms due to T2DM and they were coming for treatment on regular bases. They were then randomly assigned to the two different treatment conditions.