Session: Prevention in Early Adolescence and Later Depression Outcomes: Understanding Pathways and Identifying High Risk Groups (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and imposes substantial health and economic burdens on individuals, families, and communities. Depression undermines social and school functioning, generates severe family stress, and prompts use of mental health services, creating a significant disease burden. Longitudinal observational research has shown substantial continuity of youth depression into adulthood, with impaired functioning in work, social, and family life. Prevention programs in early adolescence are generally efficacious in ameliorating risk for depression, although much remains to be learned about their long-term impact, mediating mechanisms, and impact with specific subgroups. This symposium brings together three longitudinal studies that fill these gaps.

The first aim of this symposium is to contribute to the sparse literature on long-term impact of prevention programs on depression. Paper 1 describes a prevention program delivered in adolescence that had long-term effects that were detectable at age 22. Paper 2 presents an innovative approach for examining long-term effects using piecewise growth models, and applies this approach to show the maintenance of program effects for 1 year. Paper 3 expands current thinking about long-term impact from a sole focus on depressive symptoms to examination of intervention effect on risk processes and intergenerational transmission of risk. Overall, these studies suggest that preventive programming delivered in early adolescence can have a sustained effect, and proposes new ways to conceptualize and test long-term effects.

Second, this symposium aims to articulate how preventive interventions impact developmental pathways and life functioning. All three papers examine program impact on functional outcomes spanning family functioning, substance use, school and occupational adjustment, and health behavior. We discuss evidence that the impacts of preventive intervention are broad and varied in nature, with pathways that cut across substance use, depression, and quality of life.  

Third, we aim to identify high risk groups and factors that mitigate or exacerbate depression risk and the effects of preventive interventions. Paper 2 will discuss findings that intervention gains were not maintained at 1 year follow up for ethnic minority students but were maintained for non-minority students. Paper 3 presents results that girls with more depressed mothers are at higher risk for continuity of depressive symptoms, which was not the case for boys. 

Observations about the respective study results in light of differences in intervention content, study samples, methodological features, timing, and study design will be discussed in the integration section.