Current Projects

Improving Parent-Youth Relationships in the Treatment of Youth Depression

Communication between parents and youth can get off track for many reasons when youth experience depression. We are developing and evaluating a group program for parents and caregivers that focuses on reducing conflict and improving communication. The program has been developed in consultation with clinicians and with parents and youth with lived experience of depression. It is designed to complement youth depression treatment.

More information on the program and its development is available here.

This project is supported by the Cundill Centre for Child and Youth Depression at CAMH.

Measuring Parent-Adolescent Affect Quality through Text Message Interactions

Parent-adolescent relationship quality is an important risk or protective factor for adolescent mental health. However, most measures of communication and relationship quality rely on questionnaire ratings or lab-based tasks, neither of which captures day-to-day communication in a real world context.

I work with Computer Science experts at the University of Guelph to use sentiment analysis, a machine learning technique, to identify the affect quality (positive, negative, neutral) parents and youth express towards one another in everyday communication, captured through text messages. This project involves developing and validating this sentiment analysis approach and applying it to understand how everyday communication is related to parent and youth well-being.

This project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

A Personalized Intervention for Adolescent Sleep Difficulties

Sleep difficulties are common when adolescents experience anxiety or depression. Research also suggests that improvement in sleep is an important component of interventions for depression. Existing behavioural sleep interventions contain multiple components. We are conducting a pilot study to test whether matching intervention components to the nature of adolescents' sleep disturbance improves treatment outcomes.

This project is being done in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and other hospitals across Canada.

Risk and Protective Factors for Kids' Mental Health as we Emerge from COVID

Canadian children experienced major life disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, including school closures, family financial stress or illness, and loss of social activities. Risk factors for worsening children’s mental health have been identified, along with protective factors that appear to buffer against the negative effects of the pandemic.

We collected intensive longitudinal data about dynamic risk and protective factors from parents and children in a longitudinal Canadian birth cohort. We will use dynamic network analysis to identify chains of association and feedback loops between risk and protective factors.

Our results will provide new information about the most important factors to target in efforts to support children’s mental health as we continue to recover from the pandemic.

This project is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.