Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the treatment of Depression

Dec 2, 2010

This episode is primarily relevant to professionals.

In this episode, R. Trent Codd, III, Ed.S. interviews Rob Zettle, PhD about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the treatment of depression. Some of the topics they discuss include:

• His early work with Steve Hayes and the initial development of ACT and RFT 
• The comparative trials of CT vs. ACT in the treatment of depression 
• The ACT approach to depression as well as current directions in this area 
• And much more! 

ROB ZETTLE, PHD BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Zettle is a tenured professor in the clinical psychology program at Wichita State University. Dr. Zettle was Steven Hayes' first doctoral student and thus has had extensive training in ACT (>20 years). Students who enter the clinical psychology doctoral program at Wichita State University and work with Dr. Zettle can receive training in ACT.

The common thread running through Dr. Zettle's research is an attempt to better understand the roles that languaging and verbal behavior play in the initiation, maintenance, and alleviation of human suffering from a functional contextualistic perspective. Some of the research projects are more basic in nature, while others are more explicitly applied and clinical in their focus. More basic research projects focus on the development of both self-report and behavioral ways of assessing processes that contribute to psychological flexibility/rigidity as well as experimentally manipulating these same processes in impacting analogues of clinical forms of human suffering, such as anxiety and mood disorders. More applied research projects compare the clinical outcomes and related processes associated with traditional cognitive-behavioral interventions in treatment of depression versus ACT and related acceptance and mindfulness-based approaches.