Depression Grand Challenge

In an effort to understand more about depression experienced by pregnant and new moms, we are recruiting women who receive care at a UCLA OBGYN clinic and who are between week 28 of their pregnancy and 6 months postpartum.

After building content, a new platform, training a new cohort of coaches on the content and collaborating closely with students and administrators at East Los Angeles College, staff at Didi Hirsch and staff at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge is excited to launch the STAND at ELAC program for ELAC students.

The UCLA Depression Grand Challenge was awarded two years of funding from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health under the DMH+UCLA Public Partnership for Wellbeing in July 2020. This demonstration project explores the feasibility of implementing STAND in community colleges, as community college students are less likely to have access to mental health services and face significant need.

The article shared the “five C’s” for managing COVID-19 anxiety, as well as COVID-19–related insights from UCLA Depression Grand Challenge Co-Director Michelle Craske (psychology and psychiatry).

UCLA Depression Grand Challenge Co-Director Michelle Craske talked with “UCLA Health Zone Show” co-hosts Dr. Phil Cohen and Adam Auslund on May 23, 2020.

In response to the enormous and immediate need for support during COVID-19, UCLA partnered with Beyoncé’s BeyGOOD initiative and Jack Dorsey’s Start Small fund to create an online COVID-19 Care Package.

The DGC is recruiting approximately 200 people into the STAND coaching program. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, all training sessions are to be conducted remotely.

In 2019, after collecting a great deal of feedback about and experience with the initial implementation of the STAND system of care with the UCLA student body, the DGC secured funding from our generous donors to reimagine the way we would deliver cognitive behavioral strategies to participants leveraging technology. Funding was designated for both the delivery mechanism, which we refer to as the STAND platform, and for the content.

Discover Magazine’s Nov. 2019 issue highlighted the Depression Grand Challenge’s efforts to understand the genetic and environmental causes of depression, and mentioned the STAND system of care.

UCLA was among the campuses cited for its recognition of the need to deliver better and faster services to campus communities with the Depression Grand Challenge’s Screening and Treatment for Anxiety and Depression system of care.