An internet-based adolescent depression preventive intervention: study protocol for a randomized control trial

BioMed Central 2015

Gladstone, Tracy G
Marko-Holguin, Monika
Rothberg, Phyllis
Nidetz, Jennifer
Diehl, Anne
DeFrino, Daniela T
Harris, Mary
Ching, Eumene
Eder, Milton
Canel, Jason
Bell, Carl
Beardslee, William R
Brown, C Hendricks
Griffiths, Kathleen
Van Voorhees, Benjamin W

BACKGROUND The high prevalence of major depressive disorder in adolescents and the low rate of successful treatment highlight a pressing need for accessible, affordable adolescent depression prevention programs. The Internet offers opportunities to provide adolescents with high quality, evidence-based programs without burdening or creating new care delivery systems. Internet-based interventions hold promise, but further research is needed to explore the efficacy of these approaches and ways of integrating emerging technologies for behavioral health into the primary care system. METHODS/DESIGN We developed a primary care Internet-based depression prevention intervention, Competent Adulthood Transition with Cognitive Behavioral Humanistic and Interpersonal Training (CATCH-IT), to evaluate a self-guided, online approach to depression prevention and are conducting a randomized clinical trial comparing CATCH-IT to a general health education Internet intervention. This article documents the research framework and randomized clinical trial design used to evaluate CATCH-IT for adolescents, in order to inform future work in Internet-based adolescent prevention programs. The rationale for this trial is introduced, the current status of the study is reviewed, and potential implications and future directions are discussed. DISCUSSION The current protocol represents the only current, systematic approach to connecting at-risk youth with self-directed depression prevention programs in a medical setting. This trial undertakes the complex public health task of identifying at-risk individuals through mass screening of the general primary care population, rather than solely relying on volunteers recruited over the Internet, and the trial design provides measures of both symptomatic and diagnostic clinical outcomes. At the present time, we have enrolled N = 234 adolescents/expected 400 and N = 186 parents/expected 400 in this trial, from N = 6 major health systems. The protocol describ

Adolescent depression; Prevention; Internet; Adolescence; Primary care; Journal article

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1291748174

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