# Harnessing Network Science to Personalize Scalable Interventions for Adolescent Depression

> **NIH NIH DP5** · NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY · 2023 · $283,584

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Up to 80% of U.S. adolescents with depression will never access treatment. An often-overlooked contributor to
this discrepancy is teens’ inability to access care independently. Historically, teens’ access to mental health
treatment and research has required parental consent, yet many teens cite parents as a barrier to accessing
mental health support. Positioning parents as gatekeepers to treatment may prevent all but the most privileged
teens from accessing depression-related support. To date, some (but not all) U.S. states have enacted laws
allowing youth aged ≥12 to consent, without a parent, to mental health care, and emerging research supports
the safety and utility of these policies. For instance, across multiple NIH-funded trials, my research team has
secured waivers of parent consent from our University IRB, allowing us to run trials of online single-session
interventions (SSIs) in which teens with depression can self-refer into our studies (DP5OD028123-S1). Our
results show that teens can safely engage in online SSIs, and that SSIs can reduce depression severity up to 3
months later. Waiving parental consent requirements also seemed to boost our sample’s diversity, allowing us
to recruit population-congruent proportions of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American adolescents in a
recent nationwide trial (N=2,452). Most youth therapy trials include samples that are >90% white. Thus,
national policies allowing teens to self-refer into certain kinds of mental health support may improve access to
care for diverse adolescents. Despite this possibility, there are no formal policies for researchers, clinicians, or
families for facilitating adolescents’ self-referral into mental health research or treatment. Characterizing teens’
perspectives is a necessary step toward creating youth-centered policies to guide circumstances under which
teens should (and should not) be able to self-refer into mental health interventions and research. Therefore,
the goal of this supplement project is to characterize adolescents’ views on teens’ self-referral into mental
health research and treatment, integrating survey-based and interview data from adolescents with depression
(N=30 from the Parent Grant sample, whose parents were involved in study consent, and N=15 drawn a social
media-recruited sample, whose parents will not be involved in study consent). Specific aims are (1) to
characterize what adolescents view as the benefits and risks of teens accessing mental health support without
parent knowledge/consent; (2) to gauge whether adolescents’ views on this topic differ for supports that are
offered in-person versus online; supports that do versus do not involve a therapist (i.e., self-help); and whether
teens perceive their identities and symptoms as shaping their views on parental knowledge/consent in teen
mental health research and treatment; and (3) to compare responses to (1) and (2) across teens whose
parents were and were not ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10786569
- **Project number:** 3DP5OD028123-05S1
- **Recipient organization:** NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Jessica Lee Schleider
- **Activity code:** DP5 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $283,584
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2023-09-14 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10786569

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10786569, Harnessing Network Science to Personalize Scalable Interventions for Adolescent Depression (3DP5OD028123-05S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10786569. Licensed CC0.

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