With today’s article, we make use of the recent experience of the pandemic in order to gather essential data for the planning of future interventions with adolescents.
In the early months of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic transformed the lives of people worldwide. The closure of schools forced millions of students into isolation, causing them to give up social as well as educational opportunities. The already limited access that adolescents had to mental health services decreased even further.
In this article, we will analyze a study by Dr. Jessica Schleider, who conducted Single-Session Online Interventions, self-administered, aimed at adolescents.
The Context
The study was conducted in the United States, where it is estimated that fewer than half of adolescents can access services to care for their mental health. Furthermore, between 40% and 65% of those who do have access do not experience significant benefits.
This situation is compounded by the inevitable economic repercussions for many families as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which will lead young people to forgo appropriate treatments for their psychological well-being.
The Study
The study was conducted with 2,452 American adolescents to identify effective, efficient, and scalable strategies to reduce adolescent depression symptoms both during the pandemic and in the future. Two different single-session interventions were tested, both self-guided.
The first type of intervention aimed to teach the adolescents that personality traits and symptoms are not fixed. The other focused on activating the adolescents behaviorally, demonstrating how this activation could influence their symptoms and sense of self-efficacy.
Both interventions lasted about 30 minutes and were conducted online.
The Results
Compared to a control group, both interventions led to improvements in depressive symptoms even three months after the intervention. Both interventions decreased the sense of helplessness in young people and increased their sense of self-efficacy. The intervention that focused on the malleability of symptoms and personality traits also reduced the anxiety symptoms caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Both interventions also led to improvements in eating behaviors.
Considerations
Dr. Schleider’s research team demonstrated that even a single-session intervention can be effective and efficient in reducing depressive symptoms in adolescents. This type of intervention can easily overcome a range of structural and logistical barriers (such as poverty or insurance issues) that currently prevent young people from taking care of their mental health and which require impactful political interventions.
The success of this experiment can only inspire hope that the benefits of a single-session intervention, especially a self-administered one, can be expanded to anyone in need, without replacing more structured or long-term help when necessary.
If you’d like to learn more about Single-Session Therapy and delve into the method, you can read our link “Single-Session Therapy: Principles and Practices” or attend one of our workshops.
Vanessa Pergher
Psychologist
Team of the Italian Center for Single Session Therapy
Bibliography
Cannistrà , F., & Piccirilli, F. (2018). Single-Session Therapy: Principles and Practices. Giunti Editore.
Schleider, J. L., Mullarkey, M. C., Fox, K. R., Dobias, M. L., Shroff, A., Hart, E. A., & Roulston, C. A. (2021). A randomized trial of online single-session interventions for adolescent depression during COVID-19. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-11.