Can restoring hope, agency and purpose help young people recover from trauma?
Adolescence and early adulthood is when a difficult story tends to set. A young person who has come through trauma or is living with depression begins to form a working account of what their life is going to be like, and that account can hold for decades.
The question is whether hope, agency and purpose can be strengthened at that point, whether a young person will use an approach that asks nothing about the event itself to begin with, and whether it is emotionally safe for them while they do. Why we think this might work →
Whether the capacities the intervention is designed around can be strengthened in this age group.
Whether young people will begin, continue and return to the experience without being required to.
Whether the experience is tolerable in the moment and afterwards, for a group whose distress can be hard to read from the outside.
Whether trauma-related symptoms move, measured with PCL-5 alongside the acceptability and safety work.
Adolescents and young people with trauma or depression, in two age bands, 14 to 17 and 18 to 25, drawn from both inpatient and outpatient settings. Their parents or caregivers also take part: each family member goes through MyWhatIf, in parallel with their child. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are not yet published.
Young people work through the standard MyWhatIf experience: they bring a What If of their own, and the intervention builds from there. Families take part in the intervention itself: the parents or caregivers of participating young people each go through MyWhatIf in parallel with their children. Both generations take part in the intervention itself, not only as a support around the child. The clinical wrapper around it, how participants are approached, how sessions are spaced, and what support sits beside the experience, is designed with the Alberta team rather than by us. What a person actually does →
The primary measure and the instruments used are not yet published. What we measure and why →
The study has ethics approval. Design details are not yet published. Enrolment is stated only where it is confirmed, and it is not confirmed for this study.
Findings will be posted here, including findings that do not support our hypothesis.
