Wouter van Ballegooijen

Amsterdam University Medical Center | VUmc · Department of Psychiatry

Background Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of mental health symptoms may influence the symptoms that it measures, i.e. assessment reactivity. In the field of depression, EMA reactivity has received little attention. We aim to investigate whether EMA of depressive symptoms induces assessment reactivity. Reactivity will be operationalised as an...

Background: Online questionnaires for measuring common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders are increasingly used. The psychometrics of several pen-and-paper questionnaires have been re-examined for online use and new online instruments have been developed and tested for validity as well. This study aims to review and sy...

Background Internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (iCBT) is an effective and acceptable treatment for depression, especially when it includes guidance, but its treatment adherence has not yet been systematically studied. We conducted a meta-analysis, comparing the adherence to guided iCBT with the adherence to individual face-to-face CBT. Me...

Background: Every year, more than six million people lose a loved one through suicide. These bereaved by suicide are at relatively high risk for mental illnesses including suicide. The social stigma attached to suicide often makes it difficult to talk about grief. Participating in online forums may be beneficial for the bereaved by suicide, but it...

Internet-based guided self-help is efficacious for panic disorder, but it is not known whether such treatment is effective for milder panic symptoms as well. To evaluate the effectiveness of Don't Panic Online, an Internet-based self-help course for mild panic symptoms, which is based on cognitive behavioral principles and includes guidance by emai...

Mental health smartphone apps could increase the safety and self-management of patients at risk of suicide, but it is still unclear whether it is feasible to integrate such apps into routine mental healthcare. This study reports on the feasibility of using a safety planning app (BackUp) and a self-monitoring app (mEMA) as components of the routine...

Background: University students are susceptible to excessive stress. A web-based stress management intervention holds promise to improve stress but is still at a novel stage in Indonesia. Objective: The aim of this paper was to report the feasibility of the intervention we developed-Rileks-among university students in Indonesia in terms of accep...

BACKGROUND University students are susceptible to excessive stress. A web-based stress management intervention holds promise to improve stress but is still at a novel stage in Indonesia. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper was to report the feasibility of the intervention we developed—Rileks—among university students in Indonesia in terms of acceptabi...

Background University students are susceptible to excessive stress. A web-based stress management intervention holds promise to improve stress but is still at a novel stage in Indonesia. This present paper reports the feasibility of the intervention we developed ( ‘Rileks’ ) among university students in Indonesia in terms of acceptability and usabi...

Background Although depression is typically characterized by a persistent depressed mood, mood dynamics do seem to vary across a depressed population. Heterogeneity of mood variability (magnitude of changes) and emotional inertia (speed at which mood shifts) is seen in clinical practice. However, studies investigating the heterogeneity of these moo...

Background Effectiveness of psychological treatment is often assessed using patient-reported health evaluations. However, comparison of such scores over time can be hampered due to a change in the meaning of self-evaluations, called ‘response shift’. Insight into the occurrence of response shift seems especially relevant in the context of psycholog...

Background Safety planning-type interventions (SPTIs) for patients at risk of suicide are often used in clinical practice, but it is unclear whether these interventions are effective. Aims This article reports on a meta-analysis of studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of SPTIs in reducing suicidal behaviour and ideation. Method We search...

Background: University students with depression and anxiety do not easily receive or seek treatment; therefore, internet-based interventions have been suggested to be a promising way to improve treatment accessibility and availability. However, it has not been examined whether a guided, culturally adapted, transdiagnostic, internet-based interventi...

ABSTRACT Introduction Psychotherapy may reduce suicidal thoughts and behaviour, but its effectiveness is not well examined. Furthermore, conventional meta-analyses are unable to test possible effects of moderators affecting this relationship. This protocol outlines the building of a comprehensive database of the literature in this research field. I...

Background Many frequently used instruments fail to assess psychosocial functioning in patients with bipolar disorder. The Functioning Assessment Short Test (FAST) was developed in order to tackle this problem and to assess the main functioning problems experienced by patients with bipolar disorder. However, the original FAST is not fully applicabl...

BACKGROUND University students with depression and anxiety do not easily receive or seek treatment, therefore Internet-based interventions have been suggested to be a promising way to improve treatment accessibility and availability. However, it has not been examined whether a guided, culturally adapted, transdiagnostic, Internet-based intervention...

Background University students with depression and anxiety do not easily receive or seek treatment; therefore, internet-based interventions have been suggested to be a promising way to improve treatment accessibility and availability. However, it has not been examined whether a guided, culturally adapted, transdiagnostic, internet-based interventio...

Objective Depression and anxiety often coexist in patients with end-stage-kidney disease. Recently, studies showed that a composite ‘general distress score’ which combines depression and anxiety symptoms provides a good fit in dialysis and oncology patients. We aim to investigate if the three most frequently used self-report questionnaires to measu...

Objective Symptoms of anxiety are highly prevalent in dialysis patients and are associated with adverse clinical outcomes. Identifying symptom dimensions may help to understand the pathophysiology, improve screening and guide treatment. Currently, there are no data on symptom dimensions of anxiety in dialysis patients. This study aimed to identify...

Background: Signs and symptoms of psychopathology can be chronic but are generally regarded as less stable over time than markers of cognitive vulnerability and personality. Some findings suggest that these differences in temporal stability are modest in size but a rigorous examination across concepts is lacking. The current study investigated the...

Objective: Unraveling specific dimensions of depressive symptoms may help to improve screening and treatment in dialysis patients. We aimed to identify the best-fitting factorial structure for the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI) in dialysis patients and to assess the relation of these structure dimensions with quality of life (QoL), hospitaliza...

Background The number of university students experiencing stress is increasing, which often leads to adverse effects such as poor grades, academic probation, and emotional problems. Unfortunately, most of these problems remain untreated because of limited professional resources and fear of stigma. Several Web-based stress management interventions a...

Background There is an increasing prevalence of mental health problems among university student populations. In Indonesia, treatment rates are low among university students because of the high cost of treatment, stigma and the limited availability of mental care services. Internet-based interventions have been found to be effective in treating anxi...

Background: Suicidality could be associated with specific combinations of biological, social and psychological factors. Therefore, depressive episodes with suicidal ideation could be different from depressive episodes without suicidal ideation in terms of latent variable structures. Methods: In this study we compared latent variable structures betw...

BACKGROUND The number of university students experiencing stress is increasing, which often leads to adverse effects such as poor grades, academic probation, and emotional problems. Unfortunately, most of these problems remain untreated because of limited professional resources and fear of stigma. Several Web-based stress management interventions a...

Suicide prevention efforts often depend on the willingness or ability of people to disclose current suicidal behavior. The aim of this study is to identify characteristics that are associated with non-disclosure of suicidal ideation. Data from the Dutch cross-sectional survey Health Monitor 2016 were used, resulting in 14,322 respondents (age 19+)....

Background It remains difficult to predict and prevent suicidal behaviour, despite growing understanding of the aetiology of suicidality. Clinical guidelines recommend that health care professionals develop a safety plan in collaboration with their high-risk patients, to lower the imminent risk of suicidal behaviour. Mobile health applications prov...

Suicidal behaviour remains difficult to predict and prevent, even for experienced mental health care professionals. The known distal risk factors for suicidal behaviour are not sufficiently specific to fully understand the complex dynamic processes that precede a suicide attempt. Real-time mobile monitoring data can be used to analyse proximal risk...

Aanpak en cijfers voor suïcidepreventie in regio Kennemerland door GGD Kennemerland en samen Voor Betere Zorg (VBZ) i.s.m. 113 Zelfmoordpreventie.

Introduction Although older adults are just as likely to benefit from e-mental health as their younger counterparts, there are virtually no applications specifically designed to accommodate the needs of older adults with recurrent depression or bipolar disorder. Recurrent mood disorders constitute a large and rising proportion of the global disease...

Panic disorder with or without agoraphobia (PD/A) is a disabling disorder that involves physical anxiety symptoms, maladaptive cognitions and avoidance behaviour. Internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (ICBT) can provide accessible mental health care to those who suffer from PD/A, which may increase the uptake of psychological treatment. The...

Abstract. Background: Persons bereaved by suicide are reluctant to ask for social support when they experience feelings of guilt and blame. A web-based peer forum may provide a safe and anonymous place for mutual support. Aims: This study examined the mental health changes of visitors of two online support forums for persons bereaved by suicide and...

Recently, internet-based interventions have been proposed as effective treatments for people with panic disorder (PD). However, little is known about the clinical effects of integrating mobile technology into these interventions. Because users carry their smartphones with them throughout the day, we hypothesize that this technology can be used to s...

Turkish migrants living in the Netherlands have a high prevalence of depressive disorders, but experience considerable obstacles to accessing professional help. Providing easily accessible Internet treatments may help to overcome these barriers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a culturally sensitive, guided, self-help, pr...

The advent of web-based treatments for anxiety disorders creates a need for quick and valid online screening instruments, suitable for a range of social groups. This study validates a single-item multimedia screening instrument for agoraphobia, part of the Visual Screener for Common Mental Disorders (VS-CMD), and compares it with the text-based ago...

Common mental disorders have been found to be related to suicidal ideation and behavior. Research in the field of web-based interventions for common mental disorders, however, usually excludes participants with a suicidal risk, although a large proportion of participants might suffer from suicidal ideation. To investigate the prevalence of suicidal...

Internet based self-help for panic disorder (PD) has proven to be effective. However, studies so far have focussed on treating a full-blown disorder. Panic symptoms that do not meet DSM-IV criteria are more prevalent than the full-blown disorder and patients with sub-clinical panic symptoms are at risk of developing PD. This study is a randomised c...

Background: The internet can provide valuable support for persons with suicidal tendencies. By means of the Google search engine we found and categorised 153 Dutch websites dealing with suicide. The websites relating to suicide prevention (n = 23) were scored for quality against a list of 17 quality features. The standard of the Dutch online suici...