Movement Therapy with Depressed Inpatients: a Randomized Multiple Single Case Design

The relative lack of research on movement therapy in inpatient versus outpatient settings stems from the difficulty of conducting an interpretable study in clinical situations where multiple treatments exist. To control for the multiple treatment confound, this study used a randomized single-case experimental design with 12 replications. Results indicated that the movement therapy, which was designed to target the syndrome of a major depressive episode had a positive effect on mood across experiments (p < .001). From a clinical perspective, these results support the use of a movement program as adjunctive treatment, and challenge the view that movement is recreation but not therapy.