the effects of social skills training, drug therapy and their combination in females with major depressive disorder

purpose : the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of social skills training, drug therapy and their combination in the treatment of females with major depressive disorder.   method : 21 females with major depression were randomly selected and were then randomly assigned to three (drug therapy, social skills training and combination therapy). in order to control the variables such as age, education, duration of disorder, intensity of depression and degree of adaptation, the groups were compared by analysis of variance (anova), which showed that there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of variables mentioned above. initially all of the subjects were administered the beck depression inventory, hamilton rating scale for depression and social adaptive scale, then the treatment started. intervention lasted for 2.5 to 3 months (12-15 sessions). at the end of treatment subjects were re-assessed by the same instruments. results: the results showed that social skills training significantly increased adaptive functioning (p<0.01). combination therapy showed the best result. there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of depressive symptoms.