By Daniel Dunaief

Many teenagers who are struggling with depression need help. According to several estimates, less than half of teens with depression receive treatment that would help them manage through everything from negative feelings toward themselves and their lives to a lack of control over events during the day.

Jessica Schleider, an assistant professor of clinical psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, wants to offer teenagers battling depression a new kind of assistance.

Schleider is seeking participants for a new study, called Project Track to Treat, that offers teenagers from 11 to 16 years old symptom-tailored treatment. After participating teens respond to surveys she sends them on smartphones, she will provide single-session, computer-based interventions that address symptoms such as hopelessness or withdrawal from daily activities.

Schleider recently received a five-year, $2 million Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health to test the benefits of these half-hour computer sessions.

The funds will go toward study staff, the cost of recruiting youths and families for the study, equipment, statistical packages for the analyses she plans to run and compensation for the families who take part.

“A vast majority of teenagers who experience depression never access treatment,” Schleider said, potentially because teens are not typically in a position where they can seek out treatment on their own. “Between the lack of access to services and the limited potency of services, there needs to be a broader array of options and layers we can provide.”

In the world of clinical psychology, three to four months is generally considered brief treatment. A single computer-based session that a teenager can access at any time offers support during a much shorter time frame.

The idea behind the briefer, more targeted intervention is that it could offer help. The goal of the session is to create positive momentum, to teach teens useful skills for coping with depression-related difficulties, and to offer it in a setting where modern teenagers spend much of their time, online, Schleider suggested.

“For young people who would never go to a therapist, the question may be whether there is something else that could help, and [Schleider’s] work may offer one such ‘something else,’” John Weisz, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, wrote in an email. It’s also possible, explained Weisz, who has known Schleider since 2013 when she worked in his lab, that a single session might encourage teenagers to believe that other types of therapy can also help if they try.

Part of the motivation for this study is to determine if the nature of the symptoms — which she will explore through survey questions — can inform how teenagers will respond to a single, therapeutic session.

Schleider created these programs from available research in psychology and education. She adapted some of those programs to these specific circumstances and she taught herself rudimentary coding with html. She currently has three programs available on her website, which interested parents and teenagers can explore at www.schleiderlab.org/participate.

The teenagers participating in the study will receive questions a few times a day for three weeks about how they are feeling, checking to see any signs of depression. From those interactions, Schleider will be able to determine which symptom is the most central and which might lead to other symptoms over time. She hopes to take parameters from that to see if those symptoms predict how much a participant will respond to a session.

Schleider will also measure how teenagers respond to training through the study. If their emotional state deteriorates, the researchers can intervene and can monitor the level of risk and refer any cases appropriately. “Our top priority as researchers is to make sure the kids are taken care of,” she said.

She was skeptical before she started working on brief sessions. “I was on the side of, of course you can’t do anything in one session,” Schleider said. “I thought you need several sessions to make a sustained change.”

In looking at the available research, however, she discovered that through 50 randomized control trials in 2017, the magnitude of the effect of the trials was between small to medium range, which matched the effect of sessions ranging from an hour to 16 sessions for other teenagers. After her study, she realized that “there is something to this. We need to do more work to find out what to do and how to harness it for our youth.”

Through monitoring over two years, Schleider hopes to gain a better awareness of who will benefit from this session and under what time frame they might see an improvement.

She hopes teenagers can share their thoughts and ideas for how to improve these programs. She also offers some of these teenagers to help reconstruct the content and language and references.

Teenagers who don’t participate in the Track to Treat study can participate in an anonymous Project Yes effort, which is a program evaluation initiative. These participants can offer feedback on these sessions.

For a subset of teenagers, one session likely won’t be sufficient. 

Weisz suggested that Schleider, who joined Stony Brook last year, is a “terrific addition” to the university and the community. “I believe her work will reflect very well on both.” Weisz added that Schleider’s colleagues in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook “are among the finest psychological scientists in the nation,” where Schleider can “take her work to a very high level.”

Schleider, who joined Stony Brook last year, lives in Coram with her husband, David Payne, who is a medical resident in radiology at Stony Brook Hospital. 

As for her work, Schleider said she recognizes that there is no panacea, but that this approach is “something when the alternative is nothing.”