The Mental Health Research Department is offering this grant to optimize adolescent mental health treatments using Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions.

The proposed FOA would solicit applications focused on enhancing the potency of established adolescent mental health treatments through the use of developmentally informed and theoretically grounded JITAIs. While JITAIs could be applied to established interventions across the lifespan, we propose focusing specifically on adolescence – a developmental period characterized by heightened risk for new onset or worsening mental illness, poor engagement with face-to-face interventions, and peak engagement with technology. JITAIs have the potential to capitalize on adolescents near ubiquitous use of technology to facilitate symptom reduction and behavior change by providing content via an intrinsically motivating platform, facilitating skills practice in ecologically-valid contexts, tailoring the intervention to match the adolescents needs and preferences, providing in-the-moment feedback and reinforcement, and scaffolding adolescents in real time to mitigate impairments. Recent technological advancements have greatly improved the feasibility of delivering JITAIs, and these interventions have shown promise in a variety of health and addiction domains. Yet, no studies of JITAIs for adolescent mental disorders have been published to date, highlighting the need for research in this emerging area of intervention science.