Research Awards
Development and evaluation of an online intervention for the treatment of depression in university students
Schizophrenia Research Fund & Mental Research UK Joint Award of PhD Scholarship
Development and evaluation of an online intervention for the treatment of depression in university students
PhD Scholarship University of Nottingham
School of Community Health Sciences & Institute of Mental Health
Supervisors:
Professor Cris Glazebrook & Professor Richard Morriss
Research Student:
Bethan Davies
Start date:
September 2011
There are many factors associated with university life which can affect the mental health of students,
including leaving the family home and supportive school environments, loneliness, sleep disturbance, drug and alcohol use,
economic hardship and exam stress.
Research suggest that University students have high rates of depression compared to the general population
and the Royal College of Psychiatrists has argued that more needs to be done to identify and treat mental health problems
in this vulnerable group.
Online self-help interventions for the management of depression have been shown to be effective
and computer based-health education has lots of advantages for a student population including easy access
and an engaging and interactive format.
Computer-based education can use film to model behaviours and strategies which have been shown to improve mental health
and can provide feedback by recording progress.
This project aims to use what we know about computer based-health education
and therapy to develop an online programme specifically for university students with symptoms of depression.
We want to see if those students using the programme have fewer symptoms of depression,
make better use of available help and have a greater understanding of depression and its treatment compared to students without access.
The PhD student will also talk to students offered the programme to find out how they felt about it and if anything made it difficult to use.
If effective, the computer program will be a cost-effective intervention which be offered to students
experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression at an early stage,
Schizophrenia Research Fund & Mental Research UK
Joint Award of PhD Scholarship
Applications were sought from universities by means of an advertisement in Research Fortnight,
an alert to the MHRUK mailing list, and a notice on the MHRUK web site.
Sixteen university departments applied.
Professor Nick Rawlins (Schizophrenia Research Fund Trustee), Professor Clair Chilvers (MHRUK Trustee)
and Dr Elizabeth Clough carried out the selection process on behalf of the two charities.
Applications were externally peer reviewed and scored on quality of project, quality of supervision,
quality of research training environment, feasibility as a PhD project and potential ethical issues.
The successful application
Investigating the molecular and cellular consequences of Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1
in patient-derived neural stem cells
(Professor David Porteous and Andrew McIntosh, University of Edinburgh)
Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and recurrent major depression are devastating conditions for which current treatments
are only partially effective. Lack of access to human neural tissue is a major limitation to developing more effective
and better tolerated treatments.
To address this, we will harness the exciting potential of stem cell technology in which the University of Edinburgh
is one of the world’s leading centres: human fibroblasts are routinely obtained through biopsy,
cultured to become stem cells, then reprogrammed to become neurons, enabling us to study living human neural tissue.
Critically, we also have access to the unique Scottish t(1;11) family carrying a causative disruption of the DISC1 gene:
members have provided skin biopsies from which stem cells and neurons have already been obtained in two cases.
This PhD project will characterise these cells at the molecular, cellular and pharmacological level.
Using tools and techniques established in our laboratory, the student will profile these patient-derived stem cells
as they form neurons and compare these profiles to normal cells. We will use the profiles to tell us what neural processes are perturbed
in schizophrenia, and test how these respond to treatment with antipsychotics.
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