Project: A community-based pilot randomised controlled study of life skills classes for individuals with low mood and depression.
Target group: Community based adults – Aged 16 years of age or older with at least mild symptoms of depression/low mood.
Settings: Glasgow (Scotland) and Derry/Londonderry (N.Ireland).
Intervention: Pilot study of the Living Life to the Full class-based life-skills course.
Support offered: LLTTF classes were delivered by the charitable organisations Action on Depression (AOD) and AWARE Defeat Depression and involved eight, weekly classes that taught a range of CBT-based life skills. Classes were 90-minutes long, attended by up to 16 participants and were conducted in a classroom setting based in a locally accessible location e.g. library.
Outcomes: There was effective recruitment (n=46), randomisation, uptake and adherence with 21 Immediate Access (IA) and 25 Delayed Access Control (DAC) participants. Participants attended on average 4.46 of the 8 sessions (sd 3.06), 65.2% attended more than half of all sessions. The provisional results in the pilot suggest the intervention may improve both anxiety and depression.
Participant characteristics at baseline:
| Characteristic | Statistic | n = 46 |
| Age | mean (sd) | 43.7 (13.0) |
| Sex: Male | n (%) | 16 (35%) |
| Medication: Yes | n (%) | 24 (52%) |
| Chronicity>1 year | n (%) | 43 (93.5%) |
| Not all the time | n (%) | 1 (2%) |
| Not given | n (%) | 1 (2%) |
| PHQ-9 | mean (sd) | 14.5 (6.5) |
| GAD-7 | mean (sd) | 12.0 (5.5) |
What else?
Participant satisfaction – The mean satisfaction on the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire was 28 out of 32 (sd 4.8).
Power calculation – Mood score and follow-up rate data indicated that 126 participants in total (two groups of 63) would need to be randomised in the future large RCT to provide adequate power to detect pre-post changes in outcome measures.
Papers/outputs: McClay, C.-A. et al. (2015) A community-based pilot randomised controlled study of life skills classes for individuals with low mood and depression. BMC Psychiatry, 15(17), (doi:10.1186/s12888-015-0384-2)