psychotherapy
Creative Minds: Helping More Kids Beat Anxiety Disorders
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Dylan Gee
While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Dylan Gee often encountered children and adolescents battling phobias, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders. Most overcame them with the help of psychotherapy. But not all of the kids did, and Gee spent many an hour brainstorming about how to help her tougher cases, often to find that nothing worked.
What Gee noticed was that so many of the interventions she pondered were based on studies in adults. Little was actually known about the dramatic changes that a child’s developing brain undergoes and their implications for coping under stress. Gee, an assistant professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT, decided to dedicate her research career to bridging the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical interventions to treat children and adolescents with persistent anxiety and stress-related disorders.
Team Approach Helps Teen Depression
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Stock photo
As many as one in five U.S. teenagers experience an episode of major depression by the time they turn 18. Sadly, depression among teens often goes unrecognized, increasing the risk of suicide, substance abuse, and many other problems. Even among those who are diagnosed, few receive proper treatment. But now there’s a ray of hope from a new NIH-funded study that’s found success using a team approach that pairs depressed teens and their parents with a counselor [1].
Faced with a shortage of psychiatrists who specialize in child mental health, a multidisciplinary team from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, University of Washington School of Medicine, and Group Health in Seattle decided to use a strategy called “collaborative care” to treat depressed teenagers. There are more than 70 clinical trials showing that team-based care approaches work well for adults with depression, but there were only two such previous studies in teens—and results were mixed.
