Supporting Our Valued Adolescents or SOVA is a social media website developed in 2016 by Dr. Ana Radovic, a pediatrician and adolescent and young adult medicine subspecialist at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The goals of SOVA are to address negative health beliefs such as stigma, grow an anonymous online social support community for adolescents and young adults with symptoms of depression or anxiety, and lead to increased help-seeking and engagement with treatment and use of helpful self-management strategies. To date, we have published over 1000 posts.
Currently, SOVA is a static website due to lack of funding to continue using it in research-based intervention studies. We are grateful to support from the University of Pittsburgh to continue its online accessibility, and to 100s of prior research participants who have contributed to our knowledge and its content.
Isn’t social media bad for teens?
It depends how teens use social media – there can be many benefits in using social media, but it’s hard to avoid negative consequences like cyberbullying, especially for depressed youth. SOVA offers a healthier alternative with clear site guidelines, no private conversations, and site moderation by a team with a behavioral health background. The website is interactive but anonymous.
Who creates content for SOVA?
Over half of our articles have been written by youth themselves, termed SOVA Peer Ambassadors. These are adolescents and young adults with prior or current depression or anxiety who were recruited to contribute authentic article content, with the goal of increasing engagement in other SOVA Users who read content by others like them. SOVA Peer Ambassadors were compensated $15/month for their contributions. The rest of the articles have been written by our research team including multiple graduate students from PITT School of Social Work.
What research has been done with SOVA?
SOVA was designed based on our previous qualitative work, finding adolescent preferred an online community which offered anonymity, regular positive content, guidance about social media use, and site moderation to avoid negative interactions or unfiltered information. A series of stakeholder inter-views (youth and parent advisory boards, primary care and behavioral health clinician focus groups) resulted in iterative design updates of two secure password-protected sites: SOVA for adolescents and wiseSOVA for parents.
Both SOVA and wiseSOVA achieved their feasibility goals by recruiting 100 adolescents with depression and/or anxiety and almost 100 parents whose children had experienced symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. SOVA demonstrated acceptable usability as measured by standardized scales with 75% of users reporting good (32%), excellent (35%), or best imaginable (10%) user-friendliness. SOVA users outperformed the 90-9-1 rule: out of initial 100 users, 16 users commented and 5 users commented >5 times. Users expressed increased comfort discussing depression on SOVA due to anonymity. Users’ depression scores decreased after site use by 1.34 PHQ-9 points on average (p<0.04) and self-reported connection increased. There were no safety concerns; site moderators successfully tracked participant site activity and felt monitoring did not require too much time.
A qualitative study in-formed changes to moderator training to promote user engagement by offering gratitude and encouragement to users. A pre-implementation study using the Consolidated Framework for Intervention Research (CFIR) found PCPs desired a strategy at the clinic-level as they expressed SOVA has intuitive appeal and value, and that they wished to expose a wide audience to SOVA due to its perceived benefits of providing education on mental health and social media to adolescents (and their parents), especially to those unwilling to discuss mental health symptoms.
We conducted a pilot efficacy randomized controlled trial to com-pare SOVA to Enhanced Usual Care (EUC) in a single high-resource academic adolescent medicine clinic and found support for the underlying conceptual model, study feasibility, and improved uptake of treatment at 12 weeks. At 12 weeks, 15/18 (83%) adolescents randomized to SOVA received mental health treatment as compared to 10/20 (50%) of adolescents randomized to EUC (p= .03), where receipt of treatment was measured by a combination of either adolescent or parent self-report and a blinded manual electronic health record (EHR) extraction.
Radovic A, Li Y, Landsittel D, Odenthal KR, Stein BD, Miller E. A Social Media Website (Supporting Our Valued Adolescents) to Support Treatment Uptake for Adolescents With Depression or Anxiety: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial. JMIR Ment Health. 2022 Oct 7;9(10):e35313. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC9587493.
Radovic A, Odenthal K, Flores AT, Miller E, Stein BD. Prescribing Technology to Increase Uptake of Depression Treatment in Primary Care: A Pre-implementation Focus Group Study of SOVA (Supporting Our Valued Adolescents). J Clin Psychol Med Settings. 2020 Dec;27(4):766-782. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC7166190.
Radovic A, Gmelin T, Hua J, Long C, Stein BD, Miller E. Supporting Our Valued Adolescents (SOVA), a Social Media Website for Adolescents with Depression and/or Anxiety: Technological Feasibility, Usability, and Acceptability Study. JMIR Ment Health. 2018 Feb 26;5(1):e17. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5847821.