Supplement: Long-term Effects of the Family Check-up on Depression and Suicide Across Trials and Development

Project Summary This application, submitted as an Urgent Competitive Revision in response to NOT-MH-20-047, "Notice ofSpecial Interest (NOSI) regarding the Availability of Administrative Supplements and Urgent CompetitiveRevisions for Mental Health Research on the 2019 Novel Coronavirus," represents a change in scope from ourcurrently-funded R01, which seeks to examine the long-term crossover effects of the FCU on depression andsuicide-risk using Integrative Data Analysis across three randomized trials. These randomized trials include alarge sample of children and families who received the FCU in early childhood and middle school. At that time,the FCU was delivered as an in-person model, and was adapted for both school and home delivery. Since thattime, the FCU has been adapted to an online version which has been effective with middle school youth atenhancing parenting self-efficacy and reducing child emotional problems (Stormshak et al., 2019). Given thewide-ranging negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on parent and child functioning, there is an urgentneed for effective family-focused prevention/intervention programming that can employ telehealth-deliveryformats to reach families in the midst of the current pandemic and future public health crises of similar scale.The proposed administrative supplement will adapt and test the efficacy of the Family Check-Up Online as atreatment to foster resilient family functioning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will test the effectsof the adapted FCU Online program in a randomized clinical trial with 150 families with youth aged 10 - 14years, and assessed over 4 time-points across 6 months. We will examine the effects of the adapted FCUOnline on key mechanisms of change, including parenting skills, parental depression, and parent/child self-regulation, that we predict will directly impact child and family functioning. We predict that changes in these keytargets of the intervention will impact participant's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including youthdepression and behavior problems, the ability to cope with pandemic-focused stressors (e.g. dealing withchanges in employment status or functioning; following mandated safety measures), and social/familialfunctioning (including relational support and risk for domestic violence).