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Background: During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the General Council of Psychology in Spain, together with the regional Official Colleges of Psychology, launched the Psychological Care Telephone Program (PCTP) to provide mental health services to the population., Method: The aim of the present study was to perform a descriptive analysis of the PCTP by analysing the data collected during the lockdown and at the 12-month follow-up, and to develop a brief protocol designed to standardise data collection procedures., Results: A total of 10,119 inbound telephone calls were made to the PCTP from March to May 2020, and 337 follow-up calls at 12 months. The most common reasons for contacting the PCTP were to consult for symptoms of anxiety (66.8%), depression (30.5%), and/or family problems (13.9%). At the 12-month follow-up, many users experienced anxiety (38%), depressive (35%), and panic (34%) symptoms. More than half of users reported using psychopharmacological medicines., Conclusions: This study demonstrates the need to offer the population telephone-based mental health consultations during times of crisis. It also shows the importance of systematising intervention and data collection procedures for future crises. We propose a data collection protocol for use with emergency telephone psychological assistance programmes.

Background: Anxiety and depression are very prevalent in primary care, with high rates of chronic cases, comorbidity and lost quality of life, along with huge economic costs. The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) project, launched in the United Kingdom in 2007, has become an international benchmark for the treatment of common mental disorders. In Spain, Psicofundación developed the PsicAP clinical trial, following the precedent set by the IAPT., Method: This study reviews and compares and contrasts the methods, results, and contributions of the IAPT and PsicAP., Results: The IAPT is a project for the pragmatic implementation of evidence-based psychological therapies in primary care. PsicAP is a randomized clinical trial whose results demonstrated that adding a psychological treatment (seven group sessions of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioural therapy) to treatment-as-usual (TAU) for anxiety and depression in the primary care setting was more effective and cost-effective than TAU alone. The therapeutic gains and the cost-effectiveness were maintained at a 12 months follow-up. Moreover, the percentage of reliably recovered patients was comparable to the numbers from the IAPT., Conclusions: This brief psychological treatment should be implemented in the Spanish public health system, similar to the precedent set by the IAPT initiative.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly prevalent in the Spanish primary care (PC) setting and the leading cause of disability in Spain. The aim of this study was to evaluate several key psychometric properties of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS) in patients with or without MDD and varying degrees of symptom severity using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9)., Method: A total of 1,704 PC patients participating in the PsicAP clinical trial completed the SDS and PHQ-9. We evaluated the factor structure, measurement invariance across gender, internal consistency, and the discriminative and predictive validity., Results: Confirmatory factor analyses revealed a unifactorial model of the SDS containing 4 items (SDS-4) with the best model fit (CFI: .99; GFI: .99; TLI: 96; RMSEA: .10). This model contained the three life domain items (work, family, and social life) plus perceived stress (PS) with significant loadings. The internal consistency of the SDS-4 was acceptable in patients with or without MDD, regardless of symptom severity. The SDS-4 also showed good discriminative capacity and acceptable predictive validity in all subsamples., Conclusions: These findings support the use of the SDS-4 to assess depression-related disability in patients at Spanish primary care centres.

Background: Workers constantly resort to cognitive processes of emotion regulation to deal with emotions they experience in the workplace. These processes belong either to the "automatic" (preconscious and fast) or the "elaborative" (conscious and slow) mode. This study aims to determine the role of these variables in the work setting and to analyze their relationship with positive and negative affect, engagement and burnout., Method: 350 employees (54.8% men and 45.2% women) were presented with several instruments measuring burnout, engagement, affect and cognitive emotion regulation strategies in a prospective study. An explanatory model was tested through structural equation modeling analysis., Results: Acceptable fit indices and a significant explanatory value both for burnout (61%) and engagement (58%) were obtained. The use of "automatic" cognitive regulation strategies was associated with the presence of negative affect and burnout whereas "elaborative" processes were associated with positive affect and engagement., Conclusions: Our findings underscore the importance of the role of cognitive emotion regulation in organizational settings.