Adolescent Depression

The onset of depression peaks during adolescence (Bagalman and Cornell, 2018). According to the National Comorbidity Survey, the 12 month prevalence of mental disorders in adolescence is 40.3%, and still another 40% with depression often go undetected (Stein and Fazel, 2015). In the past decade, the number of adolescents who have depression has risen sharply, particularly in females (Twenge, 2020). Accordingly, the number of youth presenting at speciality outpatient mental health settings with emotional difficulties, like depression and suicidal thoughts, continues to increase (Mojtabai and Olfson, 2020), placing a growing demand on mental health resources. Surprsingly, Even though the number of youth with depression and in need of specialty care has increased, we continue to see that most adolescents don’t benefit from available treatments (Michael and Crowley, 2002).

Some of the reasons that adolescents might not benefit from available treatments as much as we’d hope is that they differ significantly in types of symptoms (Chen et al., 2014), age of symptom onset (Breslau et al., 2017), the course of symptoms (Yaroslavsky et al., 2013), and response to treatment (Mojtabai, Olfsan, and Han, 2016). We’re now finding, using neuroimaging, that adolescents with depression also vary widely in structural and functional connections in the brain, and that brain-based differences might help explain why a one-size-fits-all treatment is not effective for all depressed youth. In my research, I am using multimodal neuroimaging (functional and structural MRI) to understand how differences in the brain may help us identify subgroups of adolesents that vary in symptoms, symptom course, and even in the risk factors associated with depression.

This work has been or is supported by the following organizations: the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, and the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation