New Tech by White House for Youngsters with Depression

White House presents a new self-management program to cut down the depressive symptoms in a quantized group of young adults. The new anti-depression program is an avatar-based system and the young people are selected for test, as they had been experiencing these symptoms for more than 2 successive weeks. The research and study for this are being discussed at the White House as part of the Technology Innovations for Substance Use and Mental Health Disorders conference.

The avatar-based program is a 3 dimensional program and has been given the name as the Electronic Self-Management Resource Training for Mental Health (eSMART-MH). This program is basically designed which involves young adults in a primary, virtual case environment.

Now you might be having a question on "how does this program work?" Well, this program involves interaction of young adults with virtual health care providers and health coaches, in order to make the communication about their depression symptoms more effective.

The technology is said to be important because of its effectiveness on youngsters affected by depression and have a good scope of improvement, but tend not to receive any kind of treatment. Since this gene next is totally focused and equipped with internet and other gadgets, so using a very eSmart-MH tech is obviously easy for them.

The level of anxiety and stigma drops down with just talking about depression with virtual health care providers, and is of great help with the treatment. Yet there is a need for larger studies with young adults to get an idea of how eSMART-MH produces effect on depressive symptoms and then compare it with the previous one.

The study was conducted amongst people with prevalent depressive symptoms. These participants were all youngsters and were randomly assigned to receive either eSMART-MH or attention control screen-based education on healthy living which incorporated hygine while sleeping or before that, nutrition and physical activities. It was shown that the ones receiving eSMART-MH had a clinically significant reduction in their depressive symptoms as compared to the ones with attention control group. This was a three months study where in the attention control group did not prove up to the mark.

A feeling of shame and stigma have been linked to mental illness for a long time, and are known to be the prime cause affecting the mental health, affecting mostly the young ones. Introverts are known to have symptoms for long and they seem to get worse gradually in them. So it is believed that interacting with eSMART-MH, makes them gain enough self-confidence and even enables them to easily interact with health care providers and get empowered to actively participate in their own health care program.