Is the concept of clinical staging a useful way of matching levels of intervention to the needs of young people with depressive or other mood disorders?

Abstract

A clinical concept that has been taken up with some enthusiasm in mental health services for young people experiencing major mental disorders is that of clinical staging, with the emphasis on identifying and intervening in youth with various ‘at-risk’, ‘sub-threshold’ or ‘attenuated’ syndromes, before the onset of first major episodes (Shah et al 2020). While these concepts were initially developed within the rather focused context of major psychotic disorders, they are now being deployed much more widely and applied to young people presenting with a variety of mental disorders (Hickie et al 2019; Shah 2019).