Medicine & Health

With a growing demand for mental health services at colleges, a research team led by the School of Medicine has received a $3.8 million grant to test a mental health phone app to treat depression, anxiety and eating disorders in a study involving some 8,000 students at 20 colleges, universities and community colleges.

When very young children talk about wanting to commit suicide, conventional wisdom is that they don’t understand what they’re saying. But School of Medicine research has found that depressed children ages 4 to 6 who think and talk about committing suicide understand what it means to die better than other kids of the same age. They also are more likely to think of death as something caused by violence.

Leopoldo J. Cabassa, associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, is part of a team that has received a five-year $2.9 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study interventions for people suffering from mental health issues in Chile.

The signs of stress, anxiety or depression in a student may be easy to spot. The hard part is knowing what to do next. Kognito At-Risk for Faculty & Staff, an online simulation tool, will help Washington University in St. Louis faculty and staff lead effective discussions with struggling students.

Stigmas, attitudes of self-reliance and misattributing symptoms led a group of young adults experiencing their first episode of psychosis to delay seeking treatment, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

The first study to examine the initial impact of a culturally-adapted health care manager intervention aimed at helping Hispanics with serious mental illness, led by Leopoldo Cabassa of the Brown School, finds the intervention shows potential for improving health outcomes for Hispanics.

As a survivor of sex trafficking, Katie Rhoades, MSW ’11, is passionate about helping women in the commercial sex industry. After graduating from the Brown School, she founded Healing Action, a nonprofit that helps women move on from their trauma.

The American health care system must do a better job of systematically detecting and treating mental health problems within outpatient primary care clinics, especially those that serve vulnerable populations, finds a study led by Darrell Hudson, assistant professor at the Brown School.

More than half of older adults with clinical depression don’t get better when treated with an antidepressant. But results from a multicenter clinical trial that included Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that adding a second drug — an antipsychotic medication — to the treatment regimen helps many of those patients.

A new study in JAMA Psychiatry shows that therapy provided via telephone for older adults in rural areas is effective in treating anxiety disorder. In an accompanying editorial, Eric J. Lenze, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, wrote that the health-care system lacks the capacity to help the growing elderly population and that relying too heavily on sedative medications isn’t the answer.​