Mental health

About: Mental health is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 183794 publications have been published within this topic receiving 4340463 citations. The topic is also known as: mental wellbeing.

Bridging the Gap Between Laboratory and Clinic in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy

Abstract: Meta-analyses of laboratory outcome studies reveal beneficial effects of psychotherapy with children and adolescents. However, the research therapy in most of those lab studies differs from everyday clinic therapy in several ways, and the 9 studies of clinic therapy the authors have found show markedly poorer outcomes than research therapy studies. These findings suggest a need to bridge the long-standing gap between outcome researchers and clinicians. Three kinds of bridging research are proposed and illustrated: (a) enriching the research data base on treatment effects by practitioners in clinical settings—including private practice and health maintenance organizations, (b) identifying features of research therapy that account for positive outcomes and applying those features to clinical practice, and (c) exporting lab-tested treatments to clinics and assessing their effects with referred youths. If these bridging strategies were widely adopted, despite the numerous obstacles described herein, real progress might be made toward more effective treatment in clinical practice. The gulf that divides clinical practice and clinical research is now accepted as a fact of life by many in the mental health professions and in academia. For years, practicing clinicians have maintained that psychotherapy research is of little value to them (see Elliott, 1983; Kupfersmid, 1988; Luborsky, 1972; Orlinsky & Howard, 1978; Parloff, 1980;Strupp, 1989). When clinical psychologists are asked to rank the usefulness to their practice of various sources of information, research articles and books typically fall near the bottom of the scale (see L. Cohen, 1979; Cohen, Sargent, & Sechrest, 1986; Morrow-Bradley & Elliot, 1986). An experienced psychotherapist, S. D. Raw recently noted,

Mental health service use in the community and schools: Results from the four-community MECA study

Abstract: Objective To describe the use of mental health and substance abuse services by children and adolescents as reported from the four community sites included in the NIMH Methods for the Epidemiology of Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders (MECA) Study. Method As part of the MECA survey, questions were developed to identify children and adolescents utilizing mental health and substance abuse services. Youths aged 9 through 17 years and a parent/ caretaker were interviewed. Because the investigators had concerns about the capacities of the younger children in the study to describe their use of mental health services, more extensive questions were asked of parents than of youths. Results The procedures developed by the MECA project identified patterns of service use that varied in the four communities surveyed. Agreement between reports of parents and youths regarding the use of mental health and substance abuse services showed substantial Inconsistencies, similar to reports of psychiatric disorders. At three of the four sites, the majority of children meeting criteria for a psychiatric disorder and scoring 60 or less on the Children's Global Assessment Scale reported some mental health–related service in the previous year, although at two of the sites fewer than 25% of these youths were seen in the mental health specialty sector. Conclusion Community surveys show great promise for monitoring the need for mental health and substance abuse services and for identifying patterns of use.