Practice Innovations, Vol 9(2), Jun 2024, 87-104; doi:10.1037/pri0000223
Parents influence the onset, course, and recovery of adolescent depression, yet are rarely integrated into mainstream adolescent psychotherapies. Systematically targeting parents offers a promising avenue for improving current adolescent depression treatment effects. Here we outline a modular, adjunctive parent curriculum designed to accompany individual adolescent treatment that integrates complementary techniques from positive parenting, interpersonal, communication training, and dialectical behavioral therapy to target parent behaviors and cognitions. Guided by empirical evidence from published literature and feedback from parent–adolescent dyads in a large outpatient clinic, this curriculum targets six core areas: expectations, emotion regulation, validation, reinforcement, communication, and relationship building. Through this treatment, parents learn how to respond more effectively to their adolescent’s depression and create an environment that supports recovery. Notably, this curriculum is designed to be used alongside any type of adolescent therapy and can be implemented by providers of various training backgrounds to facilitate delivery across a variety of clinical settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)