Over the last decade, Dr. Benjamin Van Voorhees has been trying to find the best way to teach coping strategies to adolescents who are at risk of suffering from severe depression. The idea is to help them keep depression at bay so that it doesn"t become a devastating part of their lives. The goal is to identify kids at risk and then use a combination of traditional counseling and Internet-based learning to keep off mental disorders and their accompanying medicines.Van Voorhees said he wants to change the way doctors, especially pediatricians, deal with mental illness by moving the focus, which is now so heavily trained on treatment, to prevention. He said, "We"re trying to develop a type of behavioral vaccine that functions the same way vaccines work in fighting infections. We hope this approach will be simple, culturally acceptable, universally deployable—and inexpensive." He said that initial depressive episodes tend to strike between the ages of 13 and 17. Once an adolescent develops into severe depression, episodes can recur across his or her lifetime.Van Voorhees said young people establish patterns of coping in adolescence and young adulthood. "There"s a period of plasticity in the brain during which it"s developing the capacity for learning new coping skills," he said. "You want to make youths elastic against mental disorders, and you try to give them ways to cope so that they don"t fall into substance abuse." His research has been testing the effectiveness of Internet use and other techniques to hone such skills.Project CATCH-IT is a multimillion-dollar study. CATCH-IT includes an initial motivational interview with a physician to get the young person to understand the importance of the program. It also has a self-contained learning component on the Internet that focuses on changing behavior and improving cognitive thinking and social skills. The website, which has evolved over time, teaches plasticity skills in part by allowing patients to read stories about other teens to learn how they overcame adversity and became more successful in school, their relationships or on the job.Van Voorhees said the goal is to reach as many young people as possible. They want to develop a model that will be embedded in primary care with pediatricians screening kids who are at risk for mental disorders and trying to prevent them ahead of time. Over the years CATCH-IT has shown some evidence of being effective. But in February a new study, called PATH, was begun to determine whether CATCH-IT does a better job of preventing depression than routine mental health care and health education that teens can find online. "With CATCH-IT alone, we saw depression dropping over the years, but we didn"t have anything to compare it to," said Monika Marko-Holguin, PATH"s project manager. The expression "keep depression at bay" probably means ______

A. prevent depression from happening
B. minimize the effect of depression
C. stop treating depression as a mental disorder
D. using effective medicines to cure depression