Table 1.

Description of Psychotherapeutic interventions and control conditions

Interventions	Abbreviation	Description
Psychotherapeutic Intervention:
Behavioural therapy	BT	BT uses some kind of behavioural training and psychoeducation. BT programmes provide parents and youths information about MDD and interventions; teach youths to monitor their mood, thoughts and behaviours; proposed pleasant activity scheduling and behavioural activation.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy	CBT	CBT is a combination of BT and CT. Additional CBT skill-building techniques are used in many programmes by teaching relaxation techniques to cope with environmental stressors, providing social skills and resolution training and teaching general problem-solving.
Cognitive therapy	CT	CT uses some kind of cognitive restructuring training. CT programs ask youths to examine their automatic thoughts and core schemas and to assess the accuracy and affective consequences of their views. They aim to teach youths to engage in ‘rational’ thinking about themselves, the world and their possibilities for the future.
Family therapy	FT	FT works with families to nurture change and development. FT tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members. In the case of youth with MDD, FT aims at helping the family to answer the child’s needs for completing age-appropriate developmental tasks to relieve depression.
Interpersonal therapy	IPT	IPT aims at educating patients as to how their depression and the quality of interpersonal relationships affect one another and at addressing interpersonal problems that may be contributing to the depression (eg, grief, disputes, role transitions, social deficits). Compared with its adult version, IPT in youths is shorter, involves parents and adds a liaison role for the therapist between schools and families.
Play therapy	PT	PT used techniques to engage participants in recreational activities to help them cope with their problems and fears.
Problem-solving therapy	PST	PST focus on the problems participants are currently facing and on helping them find solutions to those problems.
Psychodynamic therapy	DYN	DYN proposed patients to help understand the origin and nature of long standing problems by investigating both conscious and non-conscious thoughts and emotional feelings. DYN uses free associations and interpretation of dreams (or drawing in children), and addresses how personal history and experience may alter the patient/therapist transference. In youth MDD, a particular interest is given to psychological trauma, early parent/child relationships, narcissistic organisation and experiences of loss.
Supportive therapy	SUP	SUP is an unstructured therapy without specific psychological techniques that it helped people to ventilate their experiences and emotions and offering empathy. These therapies are commonly described in the literature as either counselling or supportive therapy.
Control conditions:
No treatment	NT	NT is a control condition in which the participants receive no active treatment during the study and in which they do not expect to receive such after the study is over.
Psychological placebo	PBO	PBO is a control condition that was regarded as inactive by the researchers, but was to be the participants.
Treatment as usual	TAU	TAU is not considered to be structured psychotherapy, but may have some treatment effects.
Waitlist	WL	WL is a control condition in which the participants receive no active treatment during the study but are forewarned that they can receive one after the study period is over.