Promoting Treatment Access Following Pediatric Primary Care Depression Screening

Summary

Major depression (MD) in youth is a serious psychiatric illness with extensive morbidity and mortality. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released practice guidelines promoting primary care (PC)-based youth MD screening; however, even when diagnosed by PC providers, \<50% of youth with MD access treatment. Thus, a need exists for interventions that are feasible for youths and parents to access and complete-and that may strengthen parents' likelihood of pursuing longer-term services. Single-session interventions (SSIs) may help forward these goals. SSIs include elements of comprehensive treatments, but their brevity makes them easier to disseminate at scale. Meta-analytic evidence suggests SSIs can reduce youth psychopathology, including self-administered (e.g., online) SSIs. One computer-based SSI, teaching growth mindset (GM; viewing personal traits as malleable), has reduced adolescent depressive symptoms in multiple RCTs; GM-SSIs have also improved parents' expectancies that psychotherapy could benefit their children's mental health. This project will test whether these online, youth- and parent-directed GM-SSIs-designed to reduce youth depressive symptoms and improve parents' mental health treatment expectancies, respectively-may increase mental health service access, reduce youth depressive symptoms, and relieve parental stress following PC-based youth MD screening. Youths reporting elevated MD symptoms at PC visits (N = 200) will receive either Information/Psychoeducation/Referral (IPR) or IPR plus parent- and youth-directed GM-SSIs (IPR+SSI). The investigators will examine whether IPR+SSI, versus IPR alone, increases MD service access; reduces parental stress; and reduces youth depressive symptoms across three months. Results may yield a disseminable model for promoting youth treatment access after PC-based depression screening.

Conditions

• Depression

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Parent-Directed Online Single-Session Program

Online, 15-minute self-administered program for parents

BEHAVIORAL

Youth-Directed Online Single-Session Program

Online, 30 minute self-administered program for youths

BEHAVIORAL

Information/Psychoeducation/Referral

Usual care at pediatric primary care clinics participating in this study

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation

  collaborator OTHER

• Stony Brook University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jessica Schleider, PhD · Stony Brook University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

TRIPLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

11 Years

Max Age

16 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-01-15

Primary Completion

2021-04-30

Completion

2021-08-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations