Revolutionizing Youth Mental Health: The Promise of Single-Session Interventions

Most people don’t stick to psychotherapy once they’ve started.

The average patient goes to no more than 4 appointments. The most common number of completed visits is 1.

Jessica Schleider, PhD’s lab at Northwestern University is researching how youth with mental health problems can best make use of that one session.

She and her team at the Lab for Scalable Mental Health are studying single-session interventions, or SSIs.

As the name suggests the SSI is an intentional one-time encounter that leads to clinically meaningful symptom improvement. SSIs can be delivered via self-guided online tools or by trained individuals.

SSIs have been around for decades and Dr. Schleider first took an interest in the treatment in 2016. Two years later, she started her lab.

Most of Dr. Schleider’s randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have focused on the self-guided version of SSIs since it is more easily scalable.

One of her early studies showed that, for some mental health problems in youth, SSIs yield as much clinical benefit as traditional multi-session in-person therapies.

A more recent RCT of nearly 2,500 teens included large proportions of LGBTQ+ (80%) and racial or ethnic minoritized (50%) youth. In it, SSIs significantly reduced depression symptoms for 3 months compared to controls.

Importantly, the benefits did not differ by the youth’s race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Dr. Schleider has also accumulated plenty of evidence that the presence of the following realities don’t dampen the benefits in youth completing SSIs:

• History of childhood trauma.
• Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors.
• Parents with mental health problems.
• Other concurrent treatment (eg. meds, therapy, or both).
• High symptoms severity.

This is evidence that SSIs can be a powerful force to combat health inequities.

Frontier Psychiatry is working with the State of Montana to make SSIs available to all youth statewide.

I predict that SSIs will be ubiquitous within five short years. It’s the only truly scalable mental health intervention with robust evidence to support its use.

And, there is no one more qualified than Dr. Schleider to bring much-needed disruption to our field.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.