EMA Baseline Screening System for Therapists Who Treat Youths With Depressive Symptoms

Summary

Youth depression is a matter of concern worldwide. It affects an important part of the young population around the world and its consequences both physically and mentally make this issue an important research field for psychologists and other health related professionals (Zuckerbrot, Cheung, Jensen, Stein \& Laraque, 2018). Two of the biggest challenges that clinicians and researchers face when dealing with youth depression are adherence and the establishment of a therapeutic alliance (TA; Nock \& Ferriter, 2005). While several treatments are available to relief depressive symptomatology in youths, a significant number do not access them for a variety of reasons (DiMatteo, Lepper \& Corgan, 2000). In the last decades, substantial research has been conducted on how youths and the general population perceive therapy, and different methods have been developed to assess clients and therapists in order to improve outcomes and other aspects of the psychotherapy process, such as feedback tools and real-time measurements like Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) (Shiffman, et al., 2008). With the aid of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and eMental Health strategies, feedback and assessment tools can be presented in a friendly manner, providing a novel way to possibly improving adherence rates and TA scores. This study aims to develop and test the effectiveness of an Ecological Momentary Assessment mobile application to improve initial adherence and TA in psychotherapy for youths with depression.

The hypotheses for this trial are:

1. Applying an EMA baseline screening application one week before the beginning of treatment for youth depression will significantly improve the TA.
2. Applying an EMA baseline screening application one week before the beginning of treatment for youth depression will significantly improve initial adherence.

Conditions

• Depressive Symptoms

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

EMA prompting for patients

EMA prompting will consist of the delivery of the PHQ-4 and PANAS questionnaires, as well as basic identification, therapy motivations and expectations, location, current activity and social interactions. These prompts will be presented to patients during a 7 day period, 5 times per day.

BEHAVIORAL

PDF Reports for therapists

After the patients' EMA data is collected, a previously designed R script will summarize and transform the data into a brief and graphic report for therapists in the experimental arm of the study. These reports are intended to provide detailed information about the patients' mood, anxiety levels, positive and negative affects, as well as crossed data such as mood according to location, anxiety according to activity, etc.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• ANID - Millennium Science Initiative Program - NCS17_03 Millennium Nucleus to Improve the Mental Health of Adolescents and Youths (Imhay), Santiago, Chile

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Millennium Institute on Immunology and Immunotherapy

  collaborator OTHER

• Center for Psychotherapy Research, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Vania Martínez-Nahuel

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SCREENING

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

24 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-11-24

Primary Completion

2021-11-24

Completion

2021-11-30

Countries

• Chile

Study Locations