Adapting Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Chinese Americans
Adapting Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Chinese Americans
The goals of this study were to a) test whether cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is
 effective in treating depressed Chinese Americans, b) to develop and test the effectiveness
 of culturally adapt CBT, and c) to test the differential outcomes of the two treatments.
It is now known that ethnic minorities are less likely to receive quality health services and
 evidence worse treatment outcomes when compared with other groups (IOM, 1999; USDHHS, 2001).
 Moreover, there continues to be a shortage of systematic investigations examining the
 efficacy of evidence-based treatments (EBTs) with ethnic minorities, especially among Chinese
 Americans. Developing interventions that are both empirically grounded and that are
 culturally sensitive and compatible with Chinese culture is one promising strategy that may
 improve treatment outcomes for this understudied group. The goal of this study is to
 culturally adapt a cognitive-behavioral therapy manual for use with depressed Chinese
 American patients. This study will be among the first to develop a culturally adapted EBT for
 use with this ethnic group and will involve three study phases. Phase I of the study will
 focus on modifying and refining a CBT intervention protocol into a manualized treatment for
 Chinese Americans. Phase two involves a randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing the
 effects of the culturally adapted CBT treatment manual with nonadapted CBT. Phase three will
 involve further refinement of the treatment manual, data analysis, and report writing.
 Patients will be recruited from an ethnic-specific mental health center that specializes in
 treating Asian American clientele to participate in the study. Patients will be randomly
 assigned to either the adapted CBT treatment or the nonadapted CBT treatment. Moreover,
 feedback from patients and therapists in both conditions will be used to further refine the
 new treatment manual, provide valuable information about salient issues in treating depressed
 Chinese Americans, and will provide initial estimates of treatment parameters that will be
 used in preparing a larger R01 proposal to further test the adapted intervention.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  depression, Chinese American

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  bipolar, psychotic disorder, primary substance abuse problem, severe medical
 conditions that induce depression