Miriam Roland Lecture: Reducing depression and risk across the generations and the lifespan with a focus on adolescence and pregnancy as sensitive periods

About the talk

Many individuals experience depression over the lifespan, especially at high-risk periods including adolescence and during pregnancy. While evidence-based treatments and preventions exist for depression, too few people receive the help they need and, as a result, experience considerable distress and suffering.

This talk focuses on two main lines of research using Randomized Clinical Trial studies and sets of findings that together aim to reduce the treatment-prevalence gap and reduce suffering from depression. First is a novel personalized prevention program during adolescents that can improve depression prevention effects beyond established “one size fits all” prevention programs. Second is an intervention study focused on depressed pregnant individuals with novel results that hold promise to improve health and reduce risk across two generations for both mothers and their offspring early in life.

About the speaker

Dr. Benjamin Hankin is the Fred and Ruby Kanfer Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the Department of Psychology. He graduated with honors from Northwestern University with a BS in Psychology in 1995 and from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with his PhD in Clinical Psychology in 2001. He takes a developmental psychopathology perspective to better understand the development of depression and co-occurring internalizing and other psychopathologies over the lifespan.

Currently he is the co-editor-in-chief of Development and Psychopathology, the leading journal in his area of developmental psychopathology. He has conducted numerous multi-wave longitudinal studies with children and adolescents, as well as a parent, to study a wide range of risk factors and mechanisms using multiple methods, across multiple levels of analysis (genetic, brain, hormones, cognitive, interpersonal, emotional, stress, etc.), that predict prospective increases and trajectories of depression, anxiety, and related psychopathologies.

He has also applied the knowledge from risk research to conduct Randomized Clinical Trials (RCT) with the aim of reducing distress and suffering from depression and other psychopathologies among adolescents, in a unique Personalized Depression Prevention trial, as well as among pregnant individuals and their offspring.

He has co-edited two books, including the Handbook of Depression in Children and Adolescents, and published over 270 papers and chapters, many with trainees, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and multiple collaborators from many countries around the world. He has been continuously funded by the National Institute of Health and other external agencies (e.g., CIHR) since 2001.

Findings from this program of research on risk factors and mechanisms can inform novel evidence-based personalized interventions for depression that can have real-world impact and practically reduce the scourge of depression as a high burden, prevalent mental health problem that affects too many people across the lifespan.