Child and Adolescent Mood Laboratory (CAM)

Research Summary
Our current interests center on understanding the ways in which cognitive, social and biological factors interact in placing youth at risk for depression, and in developing evidence-based prevention and treatment programs for depression and suicide among youth.

Child and Adolescent Mood Program
We currently accept one student per year to receive clinical and research training in developmental psychopathology and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy with children, adolescents, and families.  The goals of this program are to enable the student to develop the clinical skills necessary to function as a practicing clinical psychologist, as well as research skills in the areas of child psychopathology and psychotherapy.  Graduates of this program will be well prepared to pursue a career as a clinical scholar in a university or academic medical center setting.

Students in this program receive intensive training in empirically-supported psychotherapy. Our work is founded on the assumption that effective clinical care is based upon a broad and critical understanding of the ways in which cognitive, social, environmental, biological, and cultural factors interact in contributing to vulnerability for psychopathology, and of how these can inform the development of empirically-supported treatments.

The goals of this program are:

• To improve the clinical services provided for children and families by developing, evaluating and disseminating empirically-supported treatments, and
• To increase our understanding of developmental psychopathology as a means of facilitating the development of prevention and treatment programs. We are a site for the Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS). The primary focus of our research during recent years, then, has been on the treatment of major depression and suicide during childhood and adolescence.