This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Brief intervention may decrease depressive symptoms in adolescents

Depressive symptoms seen among adolescents during the high school transition could be reduced with a low-cost, one-time intervention that educates about the changeable nature of personality traits, according to recent study findings published in Clinical Psychological Science.

“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,” David Scott Yeager, PhD, of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a press 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.”

Yeager and colleagues evaluated 599 high school freshman who were randomly assigned to participate in an intervention or similar control activity at the beginning of the school year to determine the effect of intervention on depressive symptoms. There was a follow-up of 9 months.

The intervention group read a passage on how individuals’ personalities have the potential to change. The participants were then asked to write their own passage about how personalities can change for future ninth-graders. The control group read a passage that focused on how individuals’ athletic abilities can change, not their personalities.

Among the control group, depressive symptoms increased about 39% from September to May (P=.038). However, no significant increase was found for depressive symptoms among the intervention group from September to May (P=.592); they were 40% less likely to report depressive symptoms at follow-up compared with the control group.

Significant effects on negative mood (P=.015) and ineffectiveness (P=.044) were found among the treatment group; intervention effect on negative self-esteem approached but did not reach significance (P=.154).

Significantly lower self-esteem was reported among the control group in May compared with September (P<.001). The decrease in self-esteem among the intervention group throughout the study period did not reach statistical significance (P=.08).

“It is important to replicate and extend these findings to deepen our understanding of the moderating and mediating mechanisms of the specific symptoms clusters that are affected,” the researchers wrote. “Doing so is the most responsible next step before broader application. Nonetheless, it is encouraging that the present theoretically informed strategy of intervening to teach an incremental theory or personality appears to have made some headway on a seemingly intractable issue — universal prevention for depressive symptoms during adolescence.”

Disclosure: The study was funded in part by the Raikes Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Thrive Foundation for Youth.