Menu
Carter Funkhouser, PhD – Columbia
Dr. Carter Funkhouser is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago and earned a BA from Connecticut College. His research focuses on identifying young people with or at risk for depression, developing and evaluating interventions to support these individuals, and disseminating these interventions in ways that maximize their reach and impact. He is particularly interested in digital interventions because they can be highly scalable, have relatively few barriers to access, and can be disseminated in a variety of settings, including online places where adolescents seek help or spend time.
Most adolescents with depression do not receive formal treatment and do not want it or cannot access it. In contrast, depressed adolescents are interested in digital interventions, which can be accessible, scalable, acceptable, and efficacious. However, disseminating digital interventions to adolescents with depression is challenging and most adolescents who start a digital intervention do not finish it.
To address these issues, we have partnered with a nonprofit organization called Mental Health America (MHA) and designed a web-based single-session intervention (SSI) to be embedded on MHA’s popular mental health screening website. Each year, hundreds of thousands of adolescents complete MHA’s depression screen and screen positive. Most of these adolescents are interested in short web-based interventions but not formal treatment, making MHA’s website an ideal implementation setting for a web-based SSI. Interpersonal problems are among the top concerns of adolescents using MHA depression screening. Therefore, the SSI teaches interpersonal skills to support teens in resolving interpersonal problems contributing to their depression.
The primary goal of Dr. Funkhouser’s AIM Fellowship project is to conduct a randomized controlled trial evaluating the SSI’s feasibility, acceptability, and effects on depressive symptoms and interpersonal skill knowledge and utilization. Adolescents will be recruited through MHA’s screening platform after screening positive for depression, as these adolescents are the intended end users.
“I’m thrilled to have AIM Youth Mental Health’s support to evaluate a free online self-help resource that can be disseminated to many teens with depression. This is an important step toward making appealing and effective support available to all teens who need it.” – Carter Funkhouser
