Adolescent Depression in Low-Income Schools

Inspiration

There remains an unmet need in terms of substantial, long-term intervention and treatment of mental illnesses in youth from low-income communities, due to societal factors such as a lack of available resources. Mental Health Screening hopes to alleviate the burden of access to mental health care by providing education and necessary resources to identify and treat depressive episodes in low-income adolescents.

What it does

Our plan is to create a program that implements a system in high schools which provides for early depression screenings- through education and early intervention, leading to proper cognitive behavioral therapy treatment. We can implement this through the use of a counselor portal, in which school psychologist's screen individuals in their respective schools, who teachers and parents have noticed changes in behavior. Teachers and parents can complete surveys o supply comments on each student, in order for the psychologists to potentially identify and meet with students who seem to be at a high risk of depression, by showing some symptoms. This portal also provides information, education, and resources about mental health in order to raise awareness in students, reduce the stigma, and provide them with a set of financially viable options for potential further treatment or support groups.

How we built it

We built this site using google pages- it is currently a fairly basic model prototype of what the actual portal would be.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges about how we could create a sort of interface that conveniently allows for teachers and parents to evaluate students, communicate finding with school psychologists, and offer various educational material and helpful resources on mental health.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we were able to find a way to combine many different aspects of treating depression in adolescents - early identification, education, prevention- in order to hopefully implement a better system of screening these low-income students.

What we learned

We learned a lot about current systems of depression management in school, but how they do not fully address all needs of their students.

What's next for Adolescent Depression in Low-Income Schools

In the future, we can do a cost analysis to ensure that this system can be reasonably implemented in the low-income schools, which already do not have many resources.