Mental illness continues to be a major public health issue in the United States, particularly among youth and young adults. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in ten youth in the U.S., aged six to 17 years, have experienced a major depressive episode in the past year. And suicide is the second leading cause of death among individuals aged 10-34.
Daphne Holt, MD, PhD, is director of the Resilience and Prevention Program and the Emotion and Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. An MGH Research Scholar 2018-2023, and an associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, she and her team are working on ways to identify the early signs of psychiatric disorders in youth and provide them with tools to manage their mental health.
Diagnostic Challenges
“I came to a realization about a decade ago that little progress had been made in developing preventive approaches in psychiatry, unlike most other areas of medicine, such as infectious disease, oncology and cardiology,” Dr. Holt says. One of the difficulties in early identification of symptoms of depression and anxiety is the lack of measurable biological indicators for these diseases, such as those that can be identified through a blood test or an MRI.
In modern medicine, diagnoses for psychiatric disorders are based on self-reported symptoms, explains Dr. Holt. Clinicians ask questions such as “Do you have little interest or pleasure in doing things?” or “Are you feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?”
“One could argue that we need these types of biomarkers in psychiatry more than in other fields of medicine since ‘self-report’ of subjective symptoms is a particularly unreliable source of information at times, especially in people who have illnesses that may affect their judgment and their ability to perceive themselves accurately,” she says.
Resilience and Prevention
The self-report method may also overlook individuals who do not meet the criteria for a diagnosable illness but still suffer from a variety of symptoms and may be at risk of developing more severe mental illness later on. Many youth fall into this category because although symptoms of mental disorders can start during childhood, the peak time of onset for many mental illnesses is during late adolescence and early adulthood.
To address this challenge, Dr. Holt founded and currently leads the Mass General Resilience and Prevention Program, which focuses on identifying youths with early signs of mental illness and teaching them resilience training to improve their mental health.
Bouncing Back
Training individuals in techniques that foster resilience when they may be at-risk for developing a mental illness equips them with the skills needed to better “bounce back” in the face of adversity. So far, this program has been tested and has shown success in reducing or eliminating the early signs of mental illness in college students, adolescents and health care workers.
“We conducted a randomized control trial that showed our program for at-risk young adults works. It significantly decreased early symptoms of mental illness long-term more so than a control condition. Since then, we have started training clinicians in this approach to hopefully implement it on a broader scale.”
Could this program be the next step in promoting youth mental health? Watch this space.
This story first appeared on Mass General Research Institute‘s Bench Press, a website that shares the latest in science news and discoveries.
For more information on Dr. Holt’s work, please contact us.
