| Identifying and Treating Maternal Depression in a Pediatric Primary Care Setting
Project Description
Inner-city women experience significant disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of depression. A significant link exists between childhood behavioral health concerns and maternal depression. This project will evaluate the effectiveness of a program, housed in a pediatric primary care setting, designed to improve detection and treatment of inner-city women with depression. It holds the potential to increase mothers’ readiness for depression treatment and reduce racial/ethnic disparities by screening for depression and offering treatment in a trusted setting that places an emphasis on how their own treatment may help their children. This project builds upon an existing research study and takes advantage of the existing infrastructure, namely screening mothers for depression at the time of their well child visits and offering treatment within the context of that setting. This innovative project takes a multidisciplinary approach to addressing a difficult problem among a challenging, low-resource patient population. Part of the Pediatrics Department’s mission statement directly matches the spirit of Finding Answers: to pursue “innovative, insightful, state-of-the-art research” with an end goal of improving the quality of care patients receive.
Lead Organization
Yale University School of Medicine
Principal Investigators:
Dr. Carol Weitzman
Dr. Kim Yonkers
For More Information
Please Contact:
Carol Weitzman, MD
carol.weitzman@yale.edu | 
