Building Emotion Awareness and Mental Health (BEAM): Community Partnership With Family Dynamics

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, postpartum depression and anxiety has increased dramatically. This is problematic as mothers in Manitoba must wait 12-18 months for therapeutic services. Children exposed to maternal mental illness in the first few years of life are at risk of negative lifelong adverse effects. Thus, the investigators of this project created and have tested The Building Emotion Awareness and Mental health (BEAM) program, which is an app-based mental health and parenting program for mothers of young children who are experiencing depression and/or anxiety. BEAM is now ready to be tested in partnership with an established community agency. This partnership will enable counsellors to provide expert-led mental health treatment to supplement and expand upon existing mental health services and will enable an established agency to address widespread unmet family mental health needs through the provision of mobile health (mHealth) content, training, and consultation. A two-arm pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) with repeated measures will be used to evaluate the BEAM program compared to MoodMission (an evidence-based mHealth program) which will be the standard of care. Outcomes will be assessed to determine the effects of the BEAM program on reducing maternal mental health symptoms among a sample of 80 mothers who self-report moderate-to-severe symptoms of depression and/or anxiety (on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, respectively), meet criteria for a current major depressive episode and/or anxiety disorder (as determined on the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview) and have a child between the ages of 6 to 18 months old.