Cohort 1: Adolescent Depression
YPI Cohort 1 selected the topic of adolescent depression. The students were drawn to the topic because they all knew loved ones who suffered from depression. Through research and analysis, they concluded that depression was a root cause for many challenges facing youth.
Cohort 1 chose to focus their efforts in supporting a program developed at Johns Hopkins University by Dr. Karen Swartz, called the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP). ADAP utilizes a high school-based curriculum to increase student awareness about the nature of depression, indicators of depression and available treatments.
After researching the program, the cohort contacted Dr. Karen Swartz and proposed a partnership to bring ADAP to Tulsa schools. At the time, ADAP was a relatively small but promising program that had been tested within youth populations in the Baltimore area. Dr. Swartz was interested in expanding the program to other locations and testing its effectiveness in a different population. She agreed to work with the YPI students to make Tulsa the first pilot site for expansion. In an interview, Dr. Swartz reflects that she was surprised to hear from the students but was quickly won over by their professionalism and dedication:
“I remember it really struck me that the students were so professional. I wouldn’t typically have considered working with a group of students... I was also impressed with their depth of understanding and commitment to the topic,” she said.
A partnership was created whereby the YPI students promoted and secured permission for the use of ADAP in Tulsa-area schools. The cohort arranged for Dr. Swartz to come to Tulsa in-person to deliver training to a group of medical students and psychiatry residents from the University - Tulsa School of Medicine. Once trained, the OU-Tulsa personnel visited high schools to teach ADAP as part of the physical education curriculum for 9th graders.
In the Cohort’s third year, ADAP was implemented in six Tulsa-area high schools, reaching over 700 students. After Cohort 1’s graduation, the trained OU-Tulsa personnel continued to implement the program in Tulsa high schools for an additional 1-2 years.
The program was ultimately discontinued due to turnover of trained personnel.
While the partnership with OU-Tulsa did not continue into the long term, Cohort 1’s partnership with Dr. Swartz and the Baltimore- based ADAP program yielded far reaching results. In parallel to the implementation of the program in Tulsa schools, YPI students also collaborated with Dr. Swartz to collect data on the effectiveness of ADAP via pre- and post tests delivered to Tulsa students who participated in the course. This data was ultimately published by the ADAP team in a 2013 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders entitled “Depression knowledge in high school students: Effectiveness of the adolescent depression awareness program.”
According to Dr. Swartz, the data collected through the partnership with YPI and the resulting publication was a huge milestone in ADAP’s history, as it “allowed ADAP to receive a grant of $1 million to complete a
proper randomized control trial. This was essential to establish ADAP as an evidence- based program.”
Today, ADAP has grown to a highly respected nationwide program that provides virtual training and curriculum to high schools free of charge. To date, ADAP’s impressive achievements include:
131,012 students taught
3,449 instructors trained
257 schools involved
22 participating states (including D.C.)
Dr. Swartz credits the partnership with YPI as instrumental to ADAP’s long-term success and impact. “It was an incredibly important collaboration in our own transformation from a little project in Maryland to a national program,” she reflects. “YPI came at exactly the right time for us to expand. It pushed us to something that was a little out of our comfort zone, and was a proof of concept that our training model could really work... Having a big win and big success was very critical for our development.”