Remarks y The term “depression” covers moderate to severe depressive episode or disorder. y The brief structured psychological interventions included in the review delivered an average of 8–10 sessions (with a range of 1–20 sessions). y Brief psychological interventions can be delivered effectively in different modalities (e.g. individual and group formats, internet-based) and through task sharing approaches. However, guided iCBT was more effective than unguided iCBT for people with moderate-to-severe depression. y Promotion of the person’s psychological skills (e.g. emotional, interpersonal, behavioural and cognitive skills) is a component of many brief psychological treatments for depressive episode/disorder. This has value beyond the reduction of depression. y It is of value to include a range of brief psychological interventions in a non-specialized health-care package covering the treatment of depression to be able to respond to people’s preferences.

Implementation considerations y Psychological interventions can be delivered effectively in non-specialized health-care settings, as well as in other settings including specialized mental health care and social care. y Face-to-face psychological interventions delivered by service providers is human resource-intensive as it requires substantial provider time, training and supervision. y Regardless of severity, both guided and unguided interventions were more effective than TAU. However, the more severe symptoms the individual had, the better the effect of the guided psychological interventions (e.g. guided iCBT) compared with unguided. Unguided brief psychological interventions can be delivered without any therapist/service provider support, so they can be less resource intensive as well and may be an option for the treatment of depressive episode/disorder in non-specialized health-care settings if there are insufficient human resources for face-to-face/guided psychological treatment. y Task sharing has been found to be an effective approach to delivering psychological interventions. y Integrating the provision of psychological interventions into primary care provides many advantages, including more holistic health care, increased accessibility of mental health services for people in need of care, opportunities for reducing the stigma of mental health problems and reduced costs. y Country adaptation and translation of training materials and tools for the provision of psychological interventions is essential. y Psychological interventions have shown to be effective for people of different ages and genders.