In India, a new programme called PRIDE will develop a single psychological treatment that can tackle depression, anxiety, and conduct disorders in adolescents simultaneously. This matters because mental disorders are the leading cause of disease burden in adolescents globally, and in India they account for up to a third of all disease burden in this age group. Over 75% of that burden comes from just three conditions: depression, anxiety, and conduct disorders. More than half of adult mental disorders begin in adolescence, yet effective psychological treatments are rarely implemented in practice. Two key barriers are a shortage of trained therapists and the fact that most proven treatments were developed in Western cultural contexts. If PRIDE succeeds, it could change how mental health care reaches young people in low-resource settings. The intervention will be personalised for each adolescent and will address the social and environmental factors that drive their condition. A computerised version will allow self-help, reducing the need for scarce therapists. The programme will also test the treatment with vulnerable out-of-school populations, who are often excluded from such research. If effective, the approach could be scaled across India and adapted for other countries facing similar shortages.
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Mental disorders are the leading cause of the burden of disease in adolescents both globally and specifically in India, with up to a third of the total burden of disease being attributed to these conditions. The most common mental disorders in adolescents are depressive, anxiety and conduct disorders which account for over 75% of the burden of mental disorders in this age group. More than 50% of the burden of adult mental disorders has its onset in adolescence. While there is a robust body of e vidence pointing to the effectiveness of psychological treatments for adolescent mental disorders there is little implementation of this evidence in the global context. Notable barriers impeding the effective coverage of evidence based psychological treatments are the lack of skilled human resources and the generalizability of interventions developed in western cultural contexts. The applicants PREMIUM program, supported by his current SRF, has constructed a systematic methodology for the develo pment of psychological treatments which address both these challenges. This methodology will be applied to develop a trans-diagnostic intervention targeting emotional and behavioural disorders in adolescents and to evaluate its effectiveness in reducing symptom severity and improving recovery rates. PRIDE will build on PREMIUM in several ways: by developing an intervention which adopts a personalized approach for adolescents and which addresses the contextual factors associated with mental diso rders; by developing a computerised version of the intervention to promote self-help; and by working with vulnerable (i.e. out of school) populations.
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