Co-Developing School-Based Approaches to Identify and Treat Depression

Co-Developing School-Based Approaches to Identify and Treat Depression in Young People

Depression is common in adolescence. Research suggests that, on average, each school class will have at least one person struggling with depression. Yet three-quarters of young people with depression do not receive any formal mental health support. When depression begins before adulthood, it is associated with ten times the economic costs and significantly worse outcomes. Adolescence is a crucial period for intervention. It is when depressive symptoms commonly begin and when our thinking habits are more possible to change. However, evidence for psychological interventions that can effectively reduce adolescent depression is limited. Research suggests that delivering interventions in schools could improve access and targeting problematic mental imagery could improve how effective interventions are. Problematic mental imagery in depression can include (A) frequent upsetting memories, (B) struggling to imagine anything positive in the future, and (C) difficulty recalling memories in detail. For example, a young person might be plagued by a memory of being bullied, think about being rejected in their future, and struggle to remember times when they had fun with friends. We have co-developed an intervention that targets these factors and is designed to be delivered in schools. In this talk, I will cover how we identify young people with low mood (and assess their risk to themselves and from others), the different types of early intervention in schools as well as our research on factors contributing to low mood in adolescence and the co-development of our interventions.

Speaker Profile

Dr Victoria Pile

Dr Victoria Pile is a Clinical Psychologist and Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at King's College London. Her programme of clinical research focuses on addressing the need for effective early interventions for adolescent depression and anxiety. These accessible psychological interventions are co-designed with people with lived experience, teachers, parents and practitioners. In particular, she has co-developed IMAGINE which is a brief intervention harnessing emotional mental imagery techniques to reduce depression. She is currently running a research project that delivers early interventions in secondary schools. Clinically, Victoria has primarily worked in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), including national and specialist services and Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP-IAPT) services. She has been awarded a series of clinical fellowships from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and currently holds an NIHR Advanced Fellowship.

Host institution

The Youth Resilience Unit (YRU) is funded by Barts Charity and commenced its work on 1st March 2021. It is housed within the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London. The overall aim of the YRU is to study how young people use resources in the community to overcome mental distress.

The YRU is currently based at the Newham Centre for Mental Health (London, UK). It seeks collaboration both with the mental health services and organisations for young people in the community outside formal health services. Key research areas include: emotional disorders, loneliness, self-harm, suicide, and global mental health.

You can follow the activities of the YRU on Twitter (@QMULResilience). For more information about the YRU and contact details, please visit our website.