Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP)

The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP) is a school-based curriculum to educate high school students, teachers, and parents about teenage depression.

The mission of ADAP is to make the curriculum available nationally for health teachers to incorporate into their classes. Through education we will increase awareness about depression and the need for evaluation and treatment.

March 2010 - ADAP has won the 2010 Outstanding Merit Award from the Maryland Foundation for Psychiatry for "increasing awareness of adolescent depression and bipolar disorder while reducing the stigma associated with these illnesses."

Click on the PLAY button below to view a short video about
the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program.

OBJECTIVES

• To educate students, parents and teachers about depression and bipolar disorder
• To measure the impact of the educational program on knowledge and attitudes about depression

BACKGROUND

The statistics on teenage depression are sobering. Depression affects approximately 5% of today’s teenagers. Of these, a mere 30% receive any sort of intervention or treatment, even though studies show treatments of depression in adolescents can be effective. The impact of adolescent depression in teenagers has been found to significantly increase the risk of:

• Major depression and anxiety disorders
• Social dysfunction, nicotine dependence, alcohol dependence and abuse
• Educational underachievement, unemployment, early parenthood
• Suicide attempts and completed suicide.

In the U.S., suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people
ages 15 to 24.

Unfortunately, many high schools do not have a formal curriculum to address depression. Among schools that address depression in health classes, very few discuss depression as a medical illness. With an estimated 5% of adolescents having depression, this is one of the most common illnesses teenagers face. The high rate of suicide in depressed teenagers underscores the importance of all high school students receiving quality education about depression and learning that depression is a treatable medical illness.

In 1999, ADAP began to develop a formal curriculum to become part of high school health classes. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry has been educating students in the Baltimore-Washington area for over 15 years.