News

October 2011
Finding a Better Way to Treat Depression in African Americans
by Philip Davis

UW–Madison School of Nursing Assistant Professor Earlise Ward has received a $1.8 million dollar, five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for the African American Depression Intervention Trial (ADDI), a study of the effectiveness of a group therapy intervention she developed specifically for African Americans with depression.

Statistics suggest that African Americans suffering from depression receive adequate mental health care only 14% of the time. Ward, a licensed psychologist, believes she can significantly improve those outcomes with a new group therapy program she has tested and developed specifically for African Americans with depression. She will conduct the research in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The NIH funding will enable her to measure whether her culturally specific "Oh Happy Day Class" (OHDC) depression intervention program is more successful with this targeted population than the industry-standard "Coping with Depression," a group therapy treatment program.

Coping with Depression (CWD) is a well-known group counseling intervention designed to treat major depression disorders; however, it has been primarily tested on white participants, Ward says. When tested with Native Americans, CWD has not been as effective.

Recent meta-analyses of culturally adapted interventions suggest interventions tailored to a specific cultural group were four times more effective than interventions provided to groups consisting of culturally diverse patients. Prior to applying for the NIH grant, Ward conducted a small pilot study using "Oh Happy Day Class" with 35 adult African Americans suffering from depression. In the pilot study, depression symptoms among participants significantly decreased, people stayed in the program throughout the course of treatment, and participants were very satisfied with the program.

The NIH project will use a two-group (OHDC vs. CWD) randomized controlled trial and a sample of 182 African American adults (ages 30-55). Ward has identified three primary goals of the project:

• To examine the effectiveness of the OHDC compared with the CWD in increasing retention, adherence, engagement, satisfaction, and treatment-seeking
• To examine the effectiveness of the OHDC compared with the CWD in reducing symptoms of depression
• To examine the effectiveness of the OHDC compared with the CWD in improving self-report of mental and physical health status and reducing self-report of disability

"If our hypotheses are right," she says, "the Oh Happy Day Class will be the first ever evidence-based culturally adapted depression intervention designed specifically for African American adults."