Building Emotion Awareness and Mental Health (BEAM): Community Partnership With Family Dynamics

Summary

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, postpartum depression and anxiety has increased dramatically. This is problematic as mothers in Manitoba must wait 12-18 months for therapeutic services. Children exposed to maternal mental illness in the first few years of life are at risk of negative lifelong adverse effects. Thus, the investigators of this project created and have tested The Building Emotion Awareness and Mental health (BEAM) program, which is an app-based mental health and parenting program for mothers of young children who are experiencing depression and/or anxiety. BEAM is now ready to be tested in partnership with an established community agency. This partnership will enable counsellors to provide expert-led mental health treatment to supplement and expand upon existing mental health services and will enable an established agency to address widespread unmet family mental health needs through the provision of mobile health (mHealth) content, training, and consultation. A two-arm pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) with repeated measures will be used to evaluate the BEAM program compared to MoodMission (an evidence-based mHealth program) which will be the standard of care. Outcomes will be assessed to determine the effects of the BEAM program on reducing maternal mental health symptoms among a sample of 80 mothers who self-report moderate-to-severe symptoms of depression and/or anxiety (on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, respectively), meet criteria for a current major depressive episode and/or anxiety disorder (as determined on the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview) and have a child between the ages of 6 to 18 months old.

Conditions

• Depression, Anxiety

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Experimental: Building Emotion Awareness and Mental Health (BEAM)

The BEAM Program is based on best-practices in telehealth and science-based program design aimed at promoting maternal mental health and supportive parenting. The BEAM Program app is hosted on the University of Manitoba secure servers and is designed/managed by Tactica Interactive. The weekly group telehealth sessions will be led by clinical coaches (a mental health professional or Doctoral-Level Clinical Psychology Student) and will use the secure videoconferencing platform Zoom (Healthcare license). Parent coaches will be mothers who have recently participated in a prior iteration of the BEAM program. Parent coaches will engage with participants on the community peer support forum and will also attend weekly telehealth sessions. The therapeutic aims of the BEAM program are to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression as well as parenting skills, and will emphasize self-compassion, effective communication practices, and social support networks.

BEHAVIORAL

Control: MoodMission

MoodMission will be used as our Standard of Care control group. MoodMission is an app based on CBT principles which creates tailored "missions" for mothers. These missions are based on self-reported mood and are aimed to improve mental health symptoms.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Calgary

  collaborator OTHER

• Tactica Interactive

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• University of Manitoba

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Leslie E Roos, PhD · University of Manitoba

• Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen, PhD · University of Calgary

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-01-28

Primary Completion

2022-07-30

Completion

2022-12-30

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations