One Time Intervention Goes A Long Way In Depression Risk For Teens

When it comes to preventing depression, a little often goes a long way.

Recent findings published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that a one-time intervention program could help dramatically decrease depression in many teens.

"We were amazed that a brief exposure to the message that people can change, during a key transition - the first few weeks of high school - could prevent increases in symptoms of depression,"said lead study author David Scott Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin, who is a psychological scientist, in a news release. "It doesn't come close to solving the whole problem. Yet finding anything promising has the potential to be important because prevention is far better than treatment - not only for financial reasons but also because it avoids human suffering."

A longitudinal study that examined 600 teens from three high schools in the ninth grade who were randomly assigned to either an intervention program or a control program evaluated their progress throughout the study.

In the intervention group, the students read a passage about how people's personalities changed along with an article about brain plasticity. The passage was focused on educating the students about how being bullied or being a bully was not fixed in their nature. The passage also aimed to get students to see that not all bullies were "bad" people. The students were then required to write about their own thoughts about how personalities can change.

In the control group, the students simply read a passage about how people can change their athletic ability.

"The findings replicate in three independent samples, but we know almost nothing about the boundary conditions of these effects or whether they will continue to show up in future studies," Yeager concluded. "For example, will this intervention work equally well for all students? What symptoms are most affected or least affected? Are there any negative side-effects? We think timing really matters - will the intervention work even just a few months later in freshman year? Could you do it one-on-one in clinical practice? We don't have good answers to these questions yet."