State of the Science 2018

Janet Walker, Caitlin Baird, & Mary Beth Welch

Peer support for youth and young adults who experience serious mental health conditions (SMHCs) is rapidly growing in popularity as an addition to the mental health service array in communities around the United States. This brief reviews the research literature that bears on the topic surrounding peer support, describes how current work at Pathways RTC is helping to build new knowledge about peer support, and outlines implications for a research agenda going forward.

Janet Walker, Pauline Jivanjee, Eileen M. Brennan, & Leigh Grover

This paper explores what is currently known about the most promising strategies for increasing providers' capacity to deliver effective behavioral health services and supports. The paper also describes how this information has been—or could be—applied to the design of cutting-edge approaches for building skills and competencies among providers that work with young people who experience serious mental health conditions.

Jennifer Blakeslee

This review synthesizes the state-of-the-science regarding how to support meaningful participation of young people in organizations and systems, closing with a review of existing assessment tools and the introduction of two new measures for agency- and system-level self-assessment of the conditions that support the meaningful inclusion of youth voice.

Jennifer Blakeslee

This review focuses on populations where systems involvement is presumed to impact the size, strength, and supportiveness of social networks, including young people who have experienced out-of-home placement in foster care, juvenile justice, or residential treatment.

Tamara Sale, Dora Raymaker, Mariam Rija, Veronica Gould, Christina Wall, & Ryan Melton

This article describes how interventions like EASA Connections that are designed based on emerging research, and further include intervention recipients as co-creators in intervention development, may help increase participation in early psychosis treatment and retention of community participation over time, leading to better overall life outcomes.

Jane Walker & Malisa Pearson

FREDLA serves as the national representative and advocate for family-run organizations and their executive directors, and supports effective stewardship of family-run organizations focused on the well-being of children and youth with mental health, emotional or behavioral challenges and their families. In this article, FREDLA offers its perspective on priorities for future research.

Brie Masselli & Johanna Bergan

Youth MOVE National (YMN), a youth-run organization focused on improving services for youth and young adults by uniting the voices of individuals who have lived experience within those systems, offers its perspective on priorities for future research.

Janet Walker, Caitlin Baird & Mary Beth Welch

This summary describes Achieve My Plan (AMP), an enhancement for existing interventions and programs that is designed to strengthen providers' skills in key areas that are typically needed for working successfully with youth and young adults. Specifically, AMP focuses on increasing providers' capacity for working with young people in ways that promote their acquisition of self-determination skills, ensure that care/treatment is based on their perspectives and priorities, and highlight and build on strengths in meaningful ways.

Janet Walker, Caitlin Baird & Mary Beth Welch

The existing research literature identifies a number of key challenges to successful implemention of the Peer Support Specialist (PSS) role for youth and young adults with serious mental health conditions. Among the top challenges are a lack of clarity regarding the role and its specific activities, and a lack of high-quality, developmentally appropriate training and coaching to support the role. Pathways RTC is exploring a response to these challenges by developing and testing an enhancement for the youth/young adult peer support role called AMP+.

Eileen M. Brennan, Pauline Jivanjee, Claudia Sellmaier, & Leigh Grover

To improve outcomes for young people with mental health needs, transition service providers require competencies grounded in research, with training designed to support applications in practice. Increasingly online platforms have been used to deliver cost-effective, convenient, and engaging service provider training with a variety of learning approaches. Promoting Positive Pathways to Adulthood (PPPA) is a research-based 10-module online program developed to increase the competencies of transition service providers.

Janet Walker & Jennifer Blakeslee

The Youth Voice at the Agency Level (Y-VAL) assessment focuses on the extent to which organizations have put into place specific, concrete types of support – including policies, processes, procedures, and other specific activities – in order to promote, support, and ensure the meaningful inclusion of youth/young adult voice in agency-level advising and decision making.

Pauline Jivanjee, Eileen M. Brennan, Leigh Grover, & Kristin Thorp

To gain understanding of training service providers’ need in order to offer developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive, and evidence-supported services to young people with mental health needs, the Pathways Transition Training Partnership and Youth MOVE National conducted an online survey, Supporting You in Supporting Youth. In summer 2017, 254 service providers responded to questions about the importance of specific competencies and skills, perceived training needs, preferred training methods, and barriers to training participation.

This document lists information about the conference sessions (sessions by Pathways staff are highlighted).

This document provides biographical statements of conference discussants and staff.