Research of Unified Protocol for the Treatment of Common Mental Disorders in Adolescents in Hong Kong

Summary

The Unified Protocol (UP) is an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioural intervention that is developed to target core temperamental characteristics underlying anxiety and depressive disorders. Ehrenreich and colleagues developed UP for adolescents (UP-A). The current study aims at evaluating efficacy of UP-A for the treatment of emotional disorders in Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong.

The current study would recruit 27 Chinese-speaking patients, age 13 to 18, with a primary diagnosis of any Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (Fifth edition) anxiety disorders and/or depressive disorder. They would be randomized into one of the two treatment arms, namely UP-A treatment condition (UP-A), and treatment-as-usual (TAU) condition. Following randomization, participants in the UP-A condition would attend individual treatment based on UP-A, which last for 10 to 12 weeks. Participants in the TAU condition would be provided with usual clinical psychological service (i.e. treatment as usual) in the first 12 weeks before they start attending the same individual treatment program.

Primary outcomes would be patient's self-rated measures on clinical symptoms, and secondary outcomes would be their clinical diagnoses, parent-rated and other self-rated measures. It is hypothesized that, comparing to those in TAU, participants in the UP-A condition would show improvements in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and functional impairment at the end of treatment. When the outcomes of all participants are combined, it is hypothesized that participants will show demonstrate improvement in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and functional impairment after completing the UP-A and at the 3-month follow-up.

Conditions

• Depressive Disorder
• Anxiety Disorders

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Unified protocol for adolescents (UP-A)

The Unified Protocol (UP) is an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioural intervention that is developed to target core temperamental characteristics underlying anxiety and depressive disorders. The goal of the UP is to help patients to cultivate a greater willingness to experience uncomfortable emotions and to reduce maladaptive emotion response tendencies, so as to lessen the intensity and frequency of uncomfortable emotions. Ehrenreich and colleagues modified from the original UP and developed the UP for adolescents (UP-A). A Chinese treatment protocol would be developed based on the UP-A. Contents of the treatment includes motivational enhancement, psychoeducation of emotion, avoidance and emotion driven behaviours, interoceptive exposure, cognitive reappraisal, emotion awareness training and emotion exposure. It consists of 10 to 12 individual sessions for the adolescents, and 4 to 6 sessions for parents or guardians.

BEHAVIORAL

Treatment as usual (TAU)

TAU participants will receive usual clinical psychological service provided in the clinic (i.e. treatment as usual) in the first 12 weeks, before they start receiving same individual treatment program based on UP-A.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Castle Peak Hospital

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Chinese University of Hong Kong

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Sophie Yan Yan Cheung, MSocSc · Chinese University of Hong Kong

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

13 Years

Max Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-09-24

Primary Completion

2020-05-22

Completion

2020-05-22

Countries

• Hong Kong

Study Locations