I’ve written a few times about the potential for mobile apps to help improve our mental health, and they seem to be increasingly popular with both clinicians and patients. A recent study from UT Southwestern comes to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion therefore, that they could help to improve the mental health of depressed teenagers.
The work found that using an app to support young people could reduce attempted suicides by half compared to teenagers who received standard care during their hospitalization.
“Those first few weeks between leaving the hospital and receiving outpatient care is a high-risk time for these adolescents,” the authors say. “We’re trying to equip them with the tools they need when they become distressed – skills that may not be taught during standard inpatient treatment because there’s so much that goes into just stabilizing patients during their few days in the hospital.”
Smart interventions
The intervention offered by the app is relatively short at just three hours, but it offers users a range of coping strategies that are based around each users favorite activities and fondest memories. This information is programmed into the app that the teen then uses upon their discharge from the hospital.
The app, called BRITE, gives the user a daily prompt, with personalized recovery strategies to use whenever they feel distressed. If the strategy doesn’t work, there are emergency numbers programmed into the app.
“These are some of the coping mechanisms that teens may forget when facing suicidal urges,” the researchers say. “We hoped that this intervention would promote safety at a vulnerable time, and the preliminary results are promising along these lines.”
The results emerged after tracking 66 teenagers who had been hospitalized after either attempting or contemplating suicide. Shockingly, 31% of those who received standard care attempted to kill themselves within 24 weeks of being discharged.
It’s part of a rising suicide rate across the United States, with teenagers particularly vulnerable. Between 2007 and 2015, the suicide rate among teenage girls doubled, whilst also rising 30% among boys. Many of these occur in the first three weeks of outpatient treatment.
The researchers believe their findings could provide crucial insight in more effectively intervening in such cases and reduce the number of teens who take their own lives. They plan to conduct a larger study to test the robustness of their findings, with plans to then provide these insights to psychiatric units should the results be replicated.
“This approach merits further study,” they say. “Focusing on stress tolerance and giving access to positive emotion could be a lifesaving difference for so many patients.”
