Guided group telehealth to deliver evidence-based therapeutic care to Black college students

PROJECT SUMMARY Mental illness among college students has become a public health crisis. Even before the pandemic, many college campuses lacked the resources to support students’ mental health needs. The rise in demand particularly impacts the over 335,000 students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Research has consistently demonstrated that there are racial inequities in mental health with Black Americans experiencing worse depressive symptoms and psychological distress compared with White Americans. College campus counseling centers have begun to think creatively about how to meet the growing demand for services as the number of available therapists is insufficient to treat the number of students seeking help. TheraGroup is the solution to leverage innovative group technology to provide Guided Group Therapy (GGT) in which students receive evidenced-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) coping skills training to address the high demand for mental health services and bridge the gap in services for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) populations on an HBCU college campuses. TheraGroup is the first large scale virtual group real-time platform for evidenced-based mental health therapy. TheraGroup is a HIPAA-compliant, platform-agnostic tool that provides the channel through which GGT will be facilitated to service the Black college students to improve student mental health outcomes. In Aim 1, we will develop the TheraGroup platform. We will achieve this by optimizing our existing platform, which is therapy enabled for one-to-one therapy, to enable one-to-many communication in a large group context. In addition, we will develop other proprietary features that create an anonymous and interactive group discussion experience. The proof of concept will be demonstrated with high usage across multiple devices. In Aim 2 we will implement a feasibility study to assess the impact of GGT via TheraGroup on measures of engagement, user experience, and mental health outcomes in Black college students. If participants’ outcome measures in the GGT group are in line with participants’ outcome measures in the IT group, the feasibility study will serve as a precursor to testing the effects of GGT via TheraGroup using a larger scale randomized control trial. Achieving these aims gives proof of concept that TheraGroup can remediate systemic inequalities in mental healthcare that disproportionately impact black college students. These insights could offer a new actionable tool to supplement existing mental health interventions to address the ever-growing need for mental health services among Black college students.