The School of Education’s Simon Goldberg, along with his colleagues at UW–Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, have received a $500,000 award from the Hope for Depression Research Foundation to develop a highly scalable, mobile health intervention to support treatment for depression.
Goldberg is an assistant professor with the School’s Department of Counseling Psychology, as well as a core faculty member for the Center for Healthy Minds. He is a co-principal investigator on the project, with Heather Abercrombie, the scientific director at the Center for Healthy Minds and a licensed psychologist. Richard Davidson, the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, and Daniel Grupe, an associate scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds, are also investigators on the project.
The project will utilize an existing mobile well-being intervention, the Healthy Minds Program (tryhealthyminds.org), that teaches simple meditation practices. The program was developed by Healthy Minds Innovations, the Center for Healthy Minds’ affiliated nonprofit.
The grant funding will allow the investigators to develop and study the efficacy of a version of the Healthy Minds Program specifically tailored for depressed individuals. Goldberg explained that in combination with psychotherapy and medications, this mobile intervention could decrease the disease burden associated with depression. In addition to self-report measures, the project will include behavioral measures that are designed to assess changes in neurocognitive processes believed to underlie depression and change in response to meditation practice.
The grant proposal stresses that the ongoing pandemic and need for physical distancing, “highlights the vital need to harness advances in mobile technology” to reduce treatment barriers for depression and other mental health crises.
Goldberg notes that “the current pandemic has laid bare the vast health disparities in our country. We hope this project can play a role in addressing these disparities, ultimately working towards increasing access to evidence-based interventions that can decrease the enormous public health burden associated with depression.”