Introduction
Depressive, human diseases, anxiety, depressive disorder, emotional disorders, depressive symptoms, depression
BARLOW, DISORDERS
Depressive and anxiety disorders represent one of the greatest burdens among human diseases worldwide (World Health Organization, The unified protocol of transdiagnostic treatment for emotional disorders (UP) is an emotion-focused treatment consisting of the intervention modules derived from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) (Barlow et al., Although UP is hypothesized to be transdiagnostically effective for a range of mental disorders associated with deficits in emotion regulation, evidence on the efficacy of UP for patients with a principal diagnosis of depressive disorder is limited (Sauer-Zavala et al., From a global mental health perspective, it is important to test the efficacy of transdiagnostic psychotherapy outside of Western countries. Efficacy study into psychosocial interventions has predominantly been limited to North America, Western Europe, and Australia (Patel et al., Hence, we aimed to test whether the addition of UP to treatment-as-usual (UP-TAU) would be more efficacious than wait-list with treatment-as-usual (WL-TAU) for reducing depressive symptoms, as assessed by the GRID-Hamilton depression rating scale (GRID-HAMD) (Williams et al., 