Effectiveness of Systematic Desensitization and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy in Reduction of Depression among Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients-A Comparative Study

In this paper we focused on effectiveness of two treatment techniques-cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and systematic desensitization imagination (SDI) on one of the high level co morbidity of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to mean depression among of Iranian OCD patients. A total of 38 participants was selected and then randomly assigned to two groups, where the first group received systematic desensitization imagination and the latter one cognitive behavior therapy. Both the groups were administered Beck‘s depression scale before and after the interventions. To find out the effectiveness of treatment techniques, repeated measure analysis of variance was used to compare the mean scores of the subjects in pre-post treatment. Results indicated CBT was found to be more effective than systematic desensitization technique in reducing depression. Only in behaviour domain, equal effectiveness was observed among the two selected therapy groups in reducing the depression.