Depression is a common disorder that can seriously affect people of all ages. Unfortunately, once someone has an episode of depression, another one is likely in the future -- making depression in adolescents particularly concerning.
But a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that at-risk teens may benefit from a program aimed at preventing future bouts of depression.
When teenagers become depressed, they can experience debilitating effects. It can affect their school, their relationships with friends, increased risk for suicide and increased problems with drugs and alcohol.
It also makes it very likely that they will have chronic depression as an adult. Expanding on prior research aimed at prevention, Dr. Judy Garber of Vanderbilt University led a study of more than 300 at-risk adolescents at four sites around the country.
Half of the teens received "usual care" while the other half met for a weekly, then monthly group program aimed at helping them prevent future depressive episodes.
“We focused on looking at how they were thinking about things particularly how they deal with stress when a stressor occurs, do they blame themselves, do they think that things are going to be terrible forever, so we get them to kind of look realistically at what are the consequences of the events, consequences of their own actions, and then what they can do about it,” Garber says.
Featured this week in the "Child Health"-themed issue of JAMA, the study found that over nine months of follow-up, those who were in the prevention program had an 11-percent lower incidence of depression compared to those who weren't.
However, within the prevention group, teens with a depressed parent when the study began were much more likely to experience a bout of depression than those with parents who were not currently depressed.
Parental depression seemed to moderate whether or not the group was going to have an effect on them -- and that was a pretty big difference.
But researchers believe since many of the teens did derive benefits from the prevention program, their findings have the potential to affect many lives.
“I think if … we can prevent depression broadly, I think it increases productivity, it may increase kids' ability to do work at school, their social relationships, and may have some cost benefit effects down the line,” says Garber.
Study authors note that one future area of research should explore the association between parental depression and adolescent symptoms, and monitor the value of simultaneous or sequential therapy for both parties.
CLICK HERE for more information about this study.
