Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence (IDEA) King's-Brazil-Nepal-Nigeria network

抑郁症是一种常见的精神障碍，在他们的一生中，世界上有五分之一的人会受到抑郁症的影响，而且往往始于青春期。抑郁症是一种特别使人衰弱的精神疾病，因为它通常在生命的早期开始，并有一个慢性过程，在一个人的一生中会发生多次抑郁发作。许多人无法获得抑郁症治疗，这在世界上最贫穷的国家尤其如此。我们拟议的合作旨在将高收入国家在研究方面的专门知识（关于抑郁症和其他精神健康问题的大部分科学知识都是在这些国家产生的）带到发展中国家，因为每10名儿童和青少年中就有9名生活在这些国家。英国伦敦国王学院与来自巴西、尼泊尔和尼日利亚的研究人员合作，旨在找到新的方法来确定哪些青少年有患抑郁症的风险，是什么保护年轻人不患抑郁症，以及这些因素在这些对比背景下是相同的还是不同的。这些信息对于帮助我们了解如何在一系列环境中进行早期干预以防止一生的痛苦至关重要。为了实现这一目标，我们建议做以下事情：首先，我们将汇集来自高收入国家（英国）、中等收入国家（巴西和尼日利亚）和低收入国家（尼泊尔）的具有不同类型专业知识的研究人员，就如何以可比的方式在这些不同国家的青少年中衡量抑郁症的风险和保护因素达成共识。然后，我们将利用在童年和青春期多个时间点参与研究的现有青少年数据集，进行初步测试，看看是否相似或不同的因素可以预测每个国家抑郁症的发展。然后，该合作网络将申请资助，开展一项新的研究项目，以评估每个国家更多的青少年，并采用共识措施，确定生物、社会、心理和环境因素，预测在这些环境中哪些青少年会患上抑郁症，哪些不会。最后，我们将找出每个国家在设备、专业知识和政策方面的潜在差距，以便我们知道在成功开展如此大规模的研究项目之前需要采取哪些措施。为了开始纠正这些差距的进程，我们将提供在线培训，并提供动手实习，以提高巴西、尼泊尔和尼日利亚的研究人员的技能，使他们能够有效地自己进行研究。最终，这项研究将产生关于如何识别和预防青少年抑郁症的新知识，这将大大降低这些国家和全球与这种疾病相关的个人、社会和经济成本。

Depression is a common mental disorder that will affect up to one out of five people around the world during their lifetimes and tends to start in adolescence. Depression is an especially debilitating mental illness because it often begins early in life and has a chronic course with many depressive episodes occurring throughout one's lifetime. Many people lack access to depression care and this is especially true in the world's poorest countries. Our proposed collaboration aims to bring a high-income country's expertise in research, where most of the scientific knowledge about depression and other mental health problems has been produced, to developing countries, where 9 out of 10 children and adolescents live. This collaboration between King's College London in the UK and researchers from Brazil, Nepal and Nigeria intends to find new ways to identify which adolescents are at risk of depression, what protects young people from developing depression, and are these factors the same or different in these contrasting contexts. Such information is crucial to help us understand how to intervene early in a range of settings to prevent a lifetime of suffering. In order to achieve this, we propose to do the following: First, we will bring together researchers with different types of expertise from high (UK), middle (Brazil and Nigeria) and low (Nepal) income countries to reach a consensus about how to measure risk and protective factors for depression in comparable ways among adolescents in these different countries. We will then draw upon existing datasets of youth who have participated in research at multiple time points during their childhood and adolescence to run initial tests to see whether similar or different factors predict the development of depression in each country. This collaborative network will then apply for funding to conduct a new research project to assess much larger numbers of adolescents in each country with the consensus measures to identify the biological, social, psychological, and environmental factors that predict which adolescents will develop depression and which will not in each of these settings. Finally, we will scope out potential gaps in equipment, expertise, and policies in each country so that we know what needs to be put in place before such a large-scale research project can be successfully conducted. In order to begin the process of rectifying these gaps, we will deliver online training and offer hands-on apprenticeships to increase the skills of researchers in Brazil, Nepal and Nigeria to enable them to effectively conduct the research themselves.Ultimately, this research will generate new knowledge on how to identify and prevent depression among youth, which would substantially decrease the personal, social and economic costs associated with the disorder in these countries and around the globe.