Overlooked and underserved: "action signs" for identifying children with unmet mental health needs.

OBJECTIVE: The US Surgeon General has called for new approaches to close the mental health services gap for the large proportion of US children with significant mental health needs who have not received evaluation or services within the previous 6 to 12 months. In response, investigators sought to develop brief, easily understood, scientifically derived "warning signs" to help parents, teachers, and the lay public to more easily recognize children with unmet mental health needs and bring these children to health care providers' attention for evaluation and possible services. METHOD: Analyses of epidemiologic data sets from >6000 children and parents were conducted to (1) determine the frequency of common but severely impairing symptom profiles, (2) examine symptom profile frequencies according to age and gender, (3) evaluate positive predictive values of symptom profiles relative to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnoses, and (4) examine whether children with 1 or more symptom profiles receive mental health services. RESULTS: Symptom-profile frequencies ranged from 0.5% to 2.0%, and 8% of the children had 1 or more symptom profile. Profiles generated moderate-to-high positive predictive values (52.7%-75.4%) for impairing psychiatric diagnoses, but fewer than 25% of children with 1 or more profiles had received services in the previous 6 months. CONCLUSIONS: Scientifically robust symptom profiles that reflect severe but largely untreated mental health problems were identified. Used as "action signs," these profiles might help increase public awareness about children's mental health needs, facilitate communication and referral for specific children in need of evaluation, and narrow the child mental health services gap.

The Application of Behavior Change Theory to Family-Based Services: Improving Parent Empowerment in Children's Mental Health.

We describe the development of a parent empowerment program (PEP) using a community-based participatory research approach. In collaboration with a group of dedicated family advocates working with the Mental Health Association of New York City and state policy makers, academic researchers took an iterative approach to crafting and refining PEP to better prepare family advocates to help bridge the gaps in service access among children with emotional and behavioral problems. Despite the growth of family-led, family support programs nationally, research that demonstrates the positive benefits of such programs is scarce in the children's mental health literature. The PEP model is based on research data about barriers families face in mental health service utilization (e.g., stigma, perceptions of providers, attitudes towards mental illness, service availability, etc.). PEP is premised on (a) the concept of empowerment as a process, (b) the need to engage parents in becoming active agents of change, and (c) the application of an integrated framework to empower parents, called the Parents as Agents of Change model. Our paper focuses on describing the application of a Unified Theory of Behavior Change as a theoretical framework to help activate parents as change agents in meeting their children's mental health needs. Based on an integrated model of grassroots driven Principles of Parent Support and research-based Unified Theory of Behavior Change, PEP's Parents as Agents of Change model provides a conceptual framework for testing the effectiveness of family support services in children's mental health, a much-needed area for future research.

Cost-effectiveness of ADHD treatments: findings from the multimodal treatment study of children with ADHD.

OBJECTIVE: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a costly public health problem. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study on the cost-effectiveness of the major forms of ADHD treatments used in NIMH's Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD (MTA Study). METHOD: Five hundred seventy-nine children with ADHD, combined type, ages 7 to 9.9, were assigned to 14 months of medication management, behavioral treatment, both combined, or community care. Services were tallied throughout the study, including medication, health care visits, behavioral treatments, and rental costs. Provider specialty, total time, and number of visits with providers were used to calculate costs, adjusted to FY 2000 dollars with the consumer price index. RESULTS: Treatment costs varied fourfold, with medication management being the least expensive, followed by behavioral treatment, and then combined treatment. Lower costs of medication treatment were found in the community care group, reflecting the less intensive (and less effective) nature of community-delivered treatment. Medical management was more effective but more costly than community care and more cost-effective than combination treatment and behavioral treatment alone. Under some conditions, combination treatment (medical management and psychotherapy) were somewhat more cost-effective, as demonstrated by lower costs per additional child "normalized" among children with multiple comorbid disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Medical management treatment, although not as effective as combined medical management and behavioral treatment, is likely to be more cost-effective in routine treatment for children with ADHD, particularly those without comorbid disorders. For some children with comorbid disorders, it may be cost-effective to provide combination treatment.

The services for children and adolescents-parent interview: development and performance characteristics.

OBJECTIVE: To date, no instrument has been developed that captures children's services use across primary care, specialty mental health, and other settings, including setting, treatment type, provider discipline, and length and intensity of specific interventions over varying follow-up periods. The authors developed a highly structured services assessment measure [Services for Children and Adolescents-Parent Interview (SCAPI)] for use in the National Institute of Mental Health Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (MTA). METHOD: After successfully piloting and refining the SCAPI during initial phases of the MTA, the authors used this measure at 24 months post-randomization to ascertain the previous 6 months of services use for all participating (516 of 579) MTA children and families and 285 age- and gender-matched classroom control children. RESULTS: Findings revealed meaningful, face-valid differences between MTA and control children in levels and types of services used during the previous 6-month period. Services use data reported by parents was substantially in accord with data independently gathered by the research data center. Site variations were found in the level and use of several specific services, such as individual child psychotherapy (sites ranged from 0% to 6.8% among classroom controls compared with 9.7% to 46.1% among MTA participants) and special education services (0% to 14.6% among classroom controls, 27.5% to 34.8% among MTA participants), consistent with differences reported in other studies. CONCLUSIONS: These data support the descriptive validity of SCAPI-ascertained services use data and indicate that the SCAPI can provide investigators and policymakers a valid means of assessing services type, intensity, onset and offset, provider type, and content.

Cost assessment of a school-based mental health screening and treatment program in New York City.

Although school-based mental health screening and treatment programs have been proposed as a viable means of reaching youth with unmet mental health needs, no previous reports have attempted to comprehensively document the costs of such programs. The purposes of this report are (1) to estimate the cost of a school-based mental health screening and treatment program in a real-world school setting, and (2) to outline the methods and procedures that should be employed by future investigators to explore the costs of such programs. The program, located in a middle school in a low-income, largely Hispanic neighborhood in New York City, aimed to screen all students in Grades 6-8 for anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders. Most students in need of treatment were referred to the school-based treatment program, where social workers offered individual and group counseling. Economic evaluation methods and a before/after study design were used to assess the costs of the screening and treatment programs for 3 years of operation. Costs were estimated from the societal perspective, which includes all measurable program costs regardless of who bears the costs, and the school perspective, which includes only costs that would be borne directly by a school operating these programs. Data primarily came from administrative records and staff interviews. The total cost ranged from 106,125 dollars to 172,018 dollars for the screening program and from 420,077 dollars to 468,320 dollars for the treatment program. The cost of the screening program ranged from 149 dollars to 234 dollars per student and the cost of the treatment program ranged from 90 dollars to 115 dollars per session. These costs were estimated from the perspective of society. Applying economic cost analysis methods in a real-world school setting is challenging, but the process can generate useful estimates. Cost analyses and cost-effectiveness studies are needed in this area.