ATTND Summary:
Suffering from depression or anxiety as a teenager is hard and can have a big impact on social and family relationships, and on education and employment. Teenagers who still have symptoms after usual or currently available treatment for depression or anxiety, or who relapse, need more treatment options.
We have developed a new treatment, Mindfulness for Adolescents and Carers (MAC). MAC is a Mindfulness-based Cognitive-Therapy teaching young people skills to help them recognise and respond to early warning signs of depression or anxiety. We want to see if MAC can support 15–18-year-olds who have recurrent depression or anxiety to recover and stay well for longer.
Depression or anxiety often runs in families, so we are asking parents/carers to take part as well, to see if taking part in MAC can be helpful for parents’/carer’s own mental health as well as supporting their child’s.
MAC treatment sessions are group-based (either in-person or online), weekly for 8 weeks. We don’t know if MAC is better than the current treatments available. Therefore, to compare them, the young person will either be assigned to:
Group 1: will take part in a MAC group, while continuing with their current treatment, OR
Group 2: will continue with their current treatment and not take part in a MAC group.
Parents/carers of those assigned to Group 1 are invited to attend sessions with other parents/carers, to work through similar materials.
All young people and parents/carers will be asked to fill out some questionnaires online for 12 months, to measure any changes in how they think and feel. This will help us compare MAC’s effects to the current treatments available.