Treatment of Adolescent Depression in Primary Care

About the Project

Adolescent depression is prevalent and, if left untreated, results in serious consequences for adolescents, their families, and society. The good news is that adolescent depression is treatable. The bad news is that many cases are undetected, and those that are, are often not treated with currently available efficacious treatments. Primary care settings provide the most important opportunities to improve care for mood and anxiety disorders among adolescents. This study is being conducted by the RAND Corporation in collaboration with primary care clinics and practice partners in the Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. areas.

The main objective of this research project is to improve our understanding of ways to optimize use of effective treatments for adolescents with depressive disorders who present in primary care settings.

The project aims to:

Describe the impact of depression on adolescent and family functioning as compared to functioning among healthy non-depressed adolescents;
Evaluate the effect of depression diagnosis feedback and patient activation, compared to an educational brochure, on care received;
Identify barriers and facilitators to receiving appropriate care for identified adolescent depression from the perspectives of adolescents, parents and their Primary Care Providers.

We believe our clinic partners will gain from this project in several ways, including identification of adolescent patients with depression, and by feedback and educational materials for patients, their parents and their treating clinicians. The results of this research will also suggest ways that clinics might improve care for adolescent depression.

The study calls for recruiting adolescent patients at the clinics to participate in the study. In addition, we will ask clinicians to participate in brief survey questionnaires administered at two points in time. We plan to work collaboratively with each participating clinic to develop specific plans for human subjects protection and data collection that are appropriate for that site. The project can provide modest remuneration to clinics to offset administrative costs of participating in the research.

This project has been funded by Pfizer for a period of three years, with screening in primary care settings expected to take place from Sept. 2004 - Sept. 2005.