Depression prevention programmes working
By Rachel O’Rourke
Depression prevention programmes are successfully helping children and adolescents, according to a new Cochrane Library Review.
The piece published by the Cochrane Library’s Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Group, part of the international organisation which evaluates medical research and aims to help improve standards in health care, found that psychological interventions to prevent depression in young people can be useful and have long-lasting protective effects.
“Our results were encouraging because depression is so common,” lead author Sally Merry, a paediatric psychiatrist with the University of Auckland, New Zealand, told the Health Behaviour News Service, part of the Centre for Advancing Health. “It’s one of the costliest disorders internationally,” she added.
According to research cited in the new review, depression ranked second greatest cause of disability in developed countries and first in many developing ones.
Depression can undercut young people’s social relationships and school performance; erode enjoyment of daily life, and increase people’s risk of substance use said the report, which was based on fifty-three studies across several countries and included over 14,000 participants between the ages of five and 19.
Young people who participated in prevention programs (mainly involving components of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) were significantly less likely to have a depressive disorder in the year following the program than youth who did not. The effect was the same whether the interventions were targeted toward a specific subset of children, such as just boys, or universal.
A recommendation for further research to be undertaken to identify the most effective programmes and to test the results “in the real world” has been made by the Cochrane Library.
