Can restoring hope, agency and purpose help young people recover from trauma?
Adolescence and early adulthood is when a difficult story tends to set. A young person who has come through trauma or is living with depression begins to form a working account of what their life is going to be like, and that account can hold for decades.
The question is whether hope, agency and purpose can be strengthened at that point, whether a young person will use an approach that asks nothing about the event itself to begin with, and whether it is emotionally safe for them while they do. Why we think this might work →
Whether the capacities the intervention is designed around can be strengthened in this age group.
Whether young people will begin, continue and return to the experience without being required to.
Whether the experience is tolerable in the moment and afterwards, for a group whose distress can be hard to read from the outside.
Whether trauma-related symptoms move, measured with PCL-5 alongside the acceptability and safety work.
Adolescents and young people with trauma or depression, in two age bands, 14 to 17 and 18 to 25, drawn from both inpatient and outpatient settings. Final inclusion and exclusion criteria are being set with the research team. VERIFY
Young people work through the standard MyWhatIf experience: they bring a What If of their own, and the intervention builds from there. The clinical wrapper around it, how participants are approached, how sessions are spaced, and what support sits beside the experience, is being designed with the Alberta team rather than by us. What a person actually does →
Which of these is primary, and which instruments are used, is for the research team to settle. What we measure and why →
Design work with the investigators is underway. Recruitment has not begun, and we will not describe it as recruiting until it has.
Findings will be posted here, including findings that do not support our hypothesis.
