Anxiety in Children with Mood Disorders: A Treatment Help or Hindrance

Colleen Cummings * Mary Fristad

Despite the high rate of comorbidity between anxiety and mood disorders (or depressive spectrum disorders) there isn’t much research on how anxiety disorders impacts treatment outcomes for mood disorders in youth. This journal article addresses this research gap and describes the effectiveness of a new treatment modality that meets criteria of a “probably efficacious” treatment called Multi-Family Psychoeducational  Psychotherapy, or MF-PEP for short.

Psychoeducational Psychotherapy teaches families about mood disorders and how to manage their symptoms in a variety of domains (e.g., biopsychosocially) and teach children “emotion regulation, communication, and problem solving skills”. When administered in multi-family groups (MF-PEP), youth “had a significantly greater decrease in mood severity”.

MF-PEP is meant to be used as an adjunctive treatment—used alongside another form of treatment. Participants in this study most frequently utilized Pharmacotherapy, but other services such as therapy, psychiatric, and school services were utilized as well.

The study of MF-PEP’s effectiveness was conducted on children between 8 and 11 years of age with an IQ of at least 70 who had a diagnosed mood disorder.  The study was racially and ethnically limited as 90.9% of the study participants were non-Hispanic, White. 73% of participants were male. 70% of participants were diagnosed with a Bipolar disorder and 30% were diagnosed with a depressive disorder.

While the study provided evidence that “MF-PEP is effective in reducing depressive and manic symptom severity for participants regardless of anxiety symptomatology,” I do have some concern that participants don’t represent a wider array of races and ethnicities. That said, psychoeducation is an incredibly important part of treatment as it provides crucial information to clients and families about their diagnoses and treatments.

The community mental health clinic in which I’m doing my fieldwork is currently experiencing severe challenges with capacity due to therapist attrition and turnover. The adoption of MF-PEP in settings such as mine could potentially assist with this since MF-PEP consists of “eight 90-minute sessions” with typically five to eight families in each group. Most sessions are held separately for parents and children therefore teaching skills to relevant parties and disseminating age-appropriate information in a strategic way.