The Resourceful adolescent program: a universal approach to the prevention of depression in adolescents

Abstract

Adolescent depression is currently recognized as a major mental health problem. There are compelling reasons to focus our attention on approaches to prevent adolescent depression. Emerging evidence of the effectiveness of prevention intervention would suggest that the allocation of mental heath resources toward depression prevention programs might prove to be highly beneficial. This chapter describes the nature and severity of the problem of adolescent depression, examines existing approaches to the prevention of adolescent depression, and argues for the value of a universal approach to prevent depression among this population. It describes a school-based depression prevention program, the Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP) that has been specifically designed to be conducted as a routine part of the school curriculum. A number of controlled trials of this program are described. These provide very encouraging early evidence for the value of this approach to the prevention of adolescent depression and also provide directions for future research in this area.