Improving mental health services is the aim of a $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to Peabody’s Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement and the Indiana University Center for Adolescent and Family Studies (CAFS).
The five-year project will examine how to improve mental health services for youth and families in community mental health settings. The study will integrate a computer-based method of measurement and feedback about treatment developed by Leonard Bickman, CEPI director, Betts Chair and professor of psychology, psychiatry and public policy at Peabody, with an evidence-based treatment developed with Tom Sexton, director of CAFS and professor of counseling and psychology in the IU School of Education.
The project will apply functional family therapy, a type of clinical treatment for youth with violent, criminal, behavioral, school and conduct problems and their families, with Bickman’s “Contextualized Feedback System” or CFS. CFS is an automated, self-scoring and clinically oriented feedback system that includes measurement of treatment progress, detailed feedback, onsite training and Web-based clinical training modules. The Vanderbilt and Indiana researchers began to work together more than three years ago to apply functional family therapy to the computerized feedback system.