QUT Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP)
The Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP) was created to enhance resilience and foster positive mental health among teenagers. Its primary goal is to prevent depression and associated challenges in this age group. Sa Reay can facilitate the RAP program for adolescents and parents/carers.
Statistics indicate that about one in five adolescents will experience depression during their teenage years, which can significantly impact their development and future opportunities.
RAP seeks to boost the psychological resilience and resourcefulness of young people by leveraging research on effective treatments for adolescent depression, as well as understanding the psychosocial risk and protective factors at the individual, family, and school levels.
RAP-A
RAP-A (Resourceful Adolescent Program for Adolescents) was created to address the need for a universal resilience-building program for teenagers that can be easily implemented in schools. Unlike targeted interventions for those at higher risk of depression, a universal program reaches all students in a specific grade. This approach makes it easier to recruit and engage adolescents, as they are not at risk of stigma from being singled out for intervention. The Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP: Shochet, Holland & Whitefield, 1997) was designed to fulfill this need.
RAP-A is a strengths-based program consisting of 11 sessions, each lasting about 50 minutes. It is conducted in groups of 8 to 16 students, typically as part of the school curriculum for grades 7 to 10. RAP-A combines cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal strategies to enhance coping skills and foster resilience, ultimately supporting positive development.
RAP-A Content
The RAP-A Program uses the metaphor from the children's story "The Three Little Pigs," where only the brick house withstands the Big Bad Wolf's attacks. Each week, participating adolescents construct their own personal 'RAP-A house' by adding various 'resource bricks' (such as 'Personal Strength Bricks,' 'Keeping Calm Bricks,' and 'Problem Solving Bricks') as the program progresses.
The cognitive-behavioral aspect of the program teaches techniques for maintaining calm, cognitive restructuring, and problem-solving. The interpersonal component emphasizes the importance of fostering harmony and resolving conflicts by understanding others' perspectives. A key theme throughout the program is equipping participants with strategies to uphold their self-esteem in the face of various stressors.
In the standard RAP-A format, there are eleven group sessions held weekly for 40 to 50 minutes during school hours, with one facilitator per group. If longer periods are available, some sessions may be combined (for instance, six sessions lasting one and a half hours each). The sessions focus on seven main areas:
- Recognizing and affirming existing strengths and resources
- Promoting self-management and self-regulation skills under stress
- Cognitive restructuring
- Developing a personal problem-solving model
- Building and utilizing psychological support networks
- Understanding others' perspectives
- Maintaining and fostering peace
RAP-P
Family factors are known to relate to depression and suicide in adolescents. Overall, the quality of parent-adolescent relationships, and the presence of family conflict are reliable predictors of adolescent depression. Conflict, and particularly escalating conflict with parents, and expression of parental over-control are well-established risk factors for adolescent depression. Alternatively, strong parental attachments and expressions of warmth and caring have been found to buffer adolescents from depression.
The RAP Parent program (RAP-P) was developed to help parents promote the optimal family environment for healthy adolescent development.
RAP-P, like RAP-A, is a competency based program which aims to help parents boost their own self esteem and the self-esteem of their adolescents. RAP-P also helps parents to manage their negative emotional overreactions to their adolescents and their adolescents' emotional overreactions to them.
The Resourceful Adolescent Program for Parents (RAP-P) involves three parent sessions, each of between two and three hour's duration. The program could also be offered as a daylong workshop. Another alternative is to break the sessions up into smaller sessions and run 5/6 workshops.
RAP-P Content
The program has three major themes, each with a key message and specific aims.
Parents Are People Too: Parents are encouraged to focus on their existing strengths, and to recognise their contribution to their adolescent's wellbeing. They also identify the impact of stress on effective parenting, and ways of managing their stress.
What Makes Adolescents Tick: Parents are encouraged to consider the specific needs of adolescents. They are facilitated to discuss adolescent development and role transitions pertinent to this age group (e.g., the dilemma of balancing the need for nurturance and protectiveness, with the desire for growing independence). Specific techniques to help parents bolster an adolescent's self-esteem are covered.
Promoting Family Harmony: Parents focus on the process of promoting harmonious family relationships and on the prevention and management of severe conflict.
In the RAP-P program facilitators do not present themselves as “experts". Rather, group leaders take the role of collaborator with the parents. Group leaders need to use some level of self-disclosure and appropriate self-deprecation with regard to their own parenting or their experiences of being parented in order to join the parents in a very real and human fashion. To increase the collaborative process between group leader and parents during the program, all examples are written in inclusive language (we, our, us) rather than exclusive language (you, our).