Effect of Coping With Stress Program to Depression, Anxiety, Brain Functions in Adolescent at High-Risk for Depression

Depression is one of the leading diseases that cause disability, disease burden and threaten public health all over the world. In addition to the economic burdens brought on by depression, it also leads to many individual problems such as deterioration in education, increased psychiatric illnesses in the future, self-harm and suicide. For these reasons, it is important to prevent depression or delay the onset of depression. One of the depression prevention programs, "Coping with Stress Program", is a psychoeducational group program based on cognitive-behavioral therapy and researches shows that the program reduces the rate of diagnosing depression and depressive symptoms in adolescents. Although it is an important mental health problem, studies on adolescent depression are limited in Turkey and existing studies are descriptive and there are no randomized controlled trials. It is believed that this research will encourage studies to prevent depression in Turkey. The primary aim of this research is to determine the effect of coping with stress program on adolescents' depression and anxiety symptoms, which is applied to adolescents with high risk for depression. The second aim is to examine the changes in brain functions of adolescents participating in the coping with stress program. In the first step, high school students will be screened for depression and adolescents with high levels of depression will be identified. In the second step, randomized controlled experimental design will be used. At the first stage of the study, adolescents with high levels of depression and volunteering to participate in the study will be randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. After pre-test measurements (determination of depression and anxiety level, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)), the Coping with Stress Program will be applied to the adolescents in the experimental group. Post-test measures (determination of depression and anxiety level, fMRI) will b