Practice Based Evidence:
Enhancing the Evidence Base for Adolescent Depression
Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health
Principal Investigator: Sarah Kate Bearman, Ph.D.
About the Principal Investigator
Sarah Kate Bearman, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at Judge Baker Children’s Center, Harvard Medical School. Her research interests include the effectiveness of evidence-based interventions for children in community practice settings, as well as the etiology and prevention of youth depression and body image concerns. Dr. Bearman received a B.A. in English Literature and Psychology from Kenyon College, and then moved to Austin, Texas, for graduate training in child clinical psychology. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Eric Stice, and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Children’s Hospital of New York-Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. During a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. John Weisz, Dr. Bearman was a project director of two projects funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and the MacArthur Foundation that seek to improve the effectiveness of child therapies for depression, anxiety disorders, and conduct problems delivered by clinicians in community practice settings. She is a prior recipient of an Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health for research concerning gender differences in adolescent depression.
Project Description
The substantial knowledge gap between research on mental health services and the actual practice of such services has been well documented and has provoked an interest in research collaborations between real-world clinicians and clinical investigators. In addition, recent evidence suggests that certain intervention procedures found in usual clinical care can be as effective as some evidence-based practices (Weisz, Jensen-Doss, & Hawley, 2006). Despite this evidence and the popularity of the collaborative sentiment, there are few examples of active collaboration between practice and research partners, and even fewer examples of efforts to improve intervention by identifying effective components of usual care. In no area of research is this goal more relevant than in the area of adolescent depression, given the high prevalence of this disorder, the well-documented negative effects of depression on various areas of functioning, and the modest treatment effect sizes reported in the literature (Weisz, McCarty, & Valeri, 2006). The paramount goals of the proposed series of studies are, therefore, to use a partnership between researchers and school-based mental health professionals to a) develop and test an observational coding method for school-based usual care group psychotherapy for adolescent depression, and to b) use the resulting coding system to identify specific intervention procedures and common factors used in group psychotherapy that are associated with clinical improvement in depression, as well as c) to describe delivery and implementation strategies rated by stakeholders as enhancing youth engagement and participation, and feasibility for group leaders. A corollary aim, for the independent investigator phase, will be to d) incorporate the procedures associated with clinical improvement, as well as implementability and engagement, into an enhanced intervention for adolescent depression and to examine the effectiveness and feasibility of this intervention in a small pilot trial.
This sequence of studies will provide information regarding the effective elements of usual care, which will benefit the direction of future interventions to address adolescent depresison. As well, the research-practice partnership that is central to this proposal targets the oft-criticized unidirectionality of efforts to bridge the research-practice gap via transporting evidence-based treatments designed into real-world practice settings for which they may be ill-suited.
Project Consultants: John R. Weisz, Ph.D.(Mentor), Ann Garland, Ph.D., Bryce McLeod, Ph.D., Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D., Laura Mufson, Ph.D., Kevin Stark, Ph.D., Paul Rohde, Ph.D., J. Stuart Ablon, Ph.D, Stephen Shirk, Ph.D., John Norcross, Ph.D.
