Delivery of Interventions:
BRITEPath has 3 components:1) BRITE, an emotion regulation and safety planning phone app that is delivered by a co-located mental health (MH) clinician to adolescents at the time of their first therapy appointment; 2) Guide2Brite, which will guide the co-located MH clinician in working with the adolescent to population content onto BRITE; and 3) BRITEBoard, which is a clinician dashboard delivered to the MH clinician and PCP.
Assignment of Interventions:
This study utilized an open trial design. A stepped wedge design was originally proposed and efforts were made to adhere to this study design, however after a year of low recruitment and resultant recruitment sites pulling out the of the study, the overall study design was changed to an open trial. Additional recruitment sites were onboarded to the study and provided with the intervention arm in order to obtain feasibility data on the intervention components of the study. As a result of the change, there are some TAU participants included in this study. For reference a stepped wedge design involves the sequential random rollout of an intervention over two time periods. Following a baseline period in which no clusters (=practices) are exposed to the intervention, the crossover is typically in one direction, from control to intervention and continues until both of the clusters have crossed-over to receive the intervention, with observations taken from each cluster and at each time period.
Study investigators will pilot BRITEPath in community pediatric and mental health practices using a stepped wedge design (n =50 adolescents).
Hypothesis: The use of BRITEPath will decrease depressive symptoms, distress, and suicidality (any self-injurious ideation, urges, or behavior) as well as improve overall functioning compared to TAU.
Of note: Study investigators initially intended to do a cost analysis as a secondary outcome measure, but it was later decided that the analysis will not be done in this pilot phase of testing and will instead be completed during the Phase 2 RCT.