About the Consortium

Dear friends and colleagues,

After the great success of our meetings in Pittsburgh (June 2009), Utrecht (September 2011), Pittsburgh (October 2013), Bergen (September 2015), Stanford (2016) and Mallorca (2018) we are pleased to invite you to the Seventh Meeting of the Global Consortium for Depression Prevention on 26th and 27th November 2019, at the University of York, UK. This is the first time the GCPD has been hosted in the UK.

Participants from previous meetings and additional experts will be invited for this meeting. The name list with contact information will be updated in the participants section as we receive responses from invitees.

This expert meeting is aimed at researchers across the world who are familiar with the main factors that are likely to shape the depression prevention research and policy agenda (epidemiologic, economic, demographic, technological, cultural and political), and who can translate these insights into innovative and relevant forms of prevention research. In previous meetings we have heard about innovative research from across the globe. The challenges to the research community which we pose in the 7th consortium are to think about the lifecourse perspective for depression prevention, and to begin to use our research to inform practice and policy. We particularly welcome submissions and contributions to address a lifecourse approach, and which inform the policy agenda.

At the meeting in York, the theme will be:

“Global Strategies for Depression Prevention: using rigorous research to inform practice and policy"

We will emphasise interdisciplinary discussions on how the field should move forward. A broad range of topics will be discussed, including identification of populations at imminent high risk for depression, empirically supported interventions to prevent depression, research designs for prevention trials, and how to scale research studies and public health campaigns so that we can eventually document impact on incidence of depression at the population level.

We are inviting brief presentations organized by topic area, and plan to allow ample time for discussion among presenters and attendees. As with previous meetings, we will take advantage of the opportunity of being physically together to allow us to brainstorm promising ideas that may not occur to teams working apart.

All invited participants are encouraged to submit abstracts for presentations on topics they find relevant for the consortium. For the upcoming meeting, special attention will be paid to the following topics:

Identification of high risk individuals, groups, and communities
Recognition of early environment in predicting risk of depression, and lifecourse approaches to prevention.
Empirically supported preventive interventions shown to reduce the incidence of depressive illness
Research designs that are feasible to conduct with the large sample sizes required for prevention trials
Methods to increase access to preventative population-level strategies
The relation between depression prevention strategies and equity within populations.
Studies focused on diverse populations, including participants from rural areas, those with low incomes and limited education, and residents of developing countries
The economic dimension of preventative strategies, and the cost-effectiveness of interventions.
Studies or proposals for translating research into evidence informed prevention policy and practice