Prof. Dr. med. Philipp Sterzer

Major depression is one of the most frequent mental disorders. Especially severe and chronic forms of depression are often characterized by an early onset in adolescence. However, early detection and intervention services have so far focused mostly on psychosis, while largely neglecting other mental health problems including depression. As it has become more apparent that emerging mental disorders do not present as clearly diagnosable syndromes in youth and young adults, new transdiagnostic models have been proposed to capture the fluctuating symptoms of these subthreshold states. A broader, multidimensional and transdiagnostic at-risk mental state has been proposed to reduce the risk of missing out on patients in need, a majority of whom develop major depression later in life. Therefore, IDEAS aims at investigating the clinical trajectories of young people seeking help at early intervention services with a focus on the predictability of the future development of depressive disorders. The project will assess the clinical risk for depression from a transdiagnostic perspective by conducting a longitudinal, multidimensional clinical assessment on the help-seeking population at the early intervention services of UPK Basel. Furthermore, the project will establish the online assessment of mechanism-based behavioural markers for the discrimination between depression and psychosis risk, and will evaluate their prospective feasibility and accuracy for the diagnostic discrimination and prediction of clinical trajectories. The results of this study will pave the way for the future development of new targeted interventions for young people at risk for depression.