About

Overview

My work is characterised by a focus on the contribution of psychological interventions to the reduction of the disease burden of mental disorders, especially depression and anxiety disorders.

  • A notable and well-known contribution to clinical research is through my meta-analyses and systematic reviews. In the past 16 years, I have worked on building databases of randomized trials on psychotherapies for depression. Since then, these databases are updated every four months and now provide a comprehensive overview of psychotherapy research in this fields. Most of the data are open access at the website of the project, www.metapsy.org and at this website visitors can run meta-analyses on subsets of studies online, without any additional software. The website now also includes meta-analytic datasets on psychological treatments of many mental disorders, inclusing four anxiety disorders, PTSD, OCD, psychosis, eating disorders, and several others. This work is done by several collaborating research groups across the globe, and the goal is to provide open-access meta-analytic databases on psychological treatments of mental disorders. Over the years I have published more than 300 meta-analyses and systematic reviews.
  • I have been a pioneer in research on prevention of the onset of new cases of mental disorders. Prevention of depression is one of the major ways in which psychological interventions can contribute to a reduction of the disease burden of depression. I led several randomised trials in people with subclinical depression in order to prevent the onset of major depressive disorders. I am coordinator of the Global Consortium for Depression prevention (https://preventionofdepression.org), and I am (co-) author of >200 papers in Pubmed about this subject; including >5 randomized prevention trials. As leader of the Global Consortium, I also have a leading role in stimulating and mentoring other researchers in examining the possibilities of prevent of depressive disorders. You can read an overview of the state-of-the-art of preventing depression in a paper that I recently wrote.
  • Delivery of psychotherapies through the Internet is another field to which I contributed considerably. Building on my early work on bibliotherapy and other minimal interventions for depression, I was one of the first researchers developing psychological treatments for use through the internet (I received my first grant for a trial on an internet-based psychological treatment in 1998). Since then, I been involved in the development and testing of dozens of internet-based interventions for many target groups since then. I (co-)authored more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journal on internet-based therapies. I was President of the International Society of Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII) from 2007-2009, and have 300 papers on this subject in Pubmed and have been involved in >35 randomized trials in this field.

Some lectures and podcasts

Selected Awards

  • 2024: the APA Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research.
  • 2018: Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research
  • 2017: Albert Ellis Award for Research
  • 2017: Lifelong Honorary membership of the Dutch Association of Psychologists (NIP) for my contribution to Dutch psychology
  • 2016/2017: Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association










Pim Cuijpers

p.cuijpers@vu.nl