School mental health (SMH) programmes serve as a necessary niche within rural communities and aim to bring accessible care to youth who may otherwise go without mental health services. The following study evaluated the impact of mental health treatment provided by the Assessment, Support, and Counseling (ASC) Center, an SMH health initiative located within a high school in rural western North Carolina during the 2011-2012 school year. Participants were high school students between 14 and 18 years of age, predominately Caucasian (91.3%) and female (65.5%). Treatment was evaluated based on score change on the Youth Outcome Questionnaire using the reliable change index (RCI; Jacobson & Truax, 1991) to track changes in symptomatology. Following ASC Center treatment, 63% of the clinical sample was deemed to have improved or recovered based on the RCI. While the study did not use an experimental design (with associated cautions regarding interpretation of findings), the results suggest that a moderate dosage of cognitive-behavioural therapy provided to adolescents in the context of a rural SMH programme is associated with reliable change for the majority of youth who take part in the treatment.
The disparity between urban and rural suicide rates is increasing. In response to thismajor public health problem, clinicians and schoolmental health researchers designed a systematic crisis intervention protocol to be used with adolescents presenting with suicidal or homicidal ideation. The prevention of escalating adolescent crisis events (PEACE) protocol is a comprehensive risk assessment designed for use by licensed clinicians working collaboratively with school personnel. A revised and extended version of the PEACE protocol was employed during 68 crisis events involving 42 high school students in 2013-14. These results and clinical implications of utilizing a systematic protocol to address potential suicidal or violence threats are discussed.
Given the prevalence of mental health difficulties among children and adolescents, schools have become a suitable context for providing psychological services to those who may otherwise go untreated. The co-occurrence of mental health impairments and academic problems has been widely cited, and many school mental health (SMH) programmes have begun to assess academic variables in treatment outcome. The current study evaluated a rural SMH programme's success at treating symptoms of psychological distress among high school participants and the potential association with participants' attendance, grade point averages (GPAs) and discipline referrals. Participants were 58 high school students between 14 and 18 years old. Results indicate that non-manualized cognitive behavioural therapy administered for an average of 14.88 sessions was successful at treating mental health concerns, as measured by a selfreport questionnaire collected several times throughout treatment. In addition, a large proportion of students demonstrated improvements or stability in attendance and discipline when comparing baseline and post-treatment data, though no differences emerged between the time points for the sample as a whole. Although the findings regarding academic outcomes were not impressive overall, individual outcomes varied widely, with slightly over half of the students recording higher GPAs than at baseline. Furthermore, the fact that stability rates across the variables were reasonably high might suggest that we consider widening the definition of success to include protection from decline, reserving expectations for improvement only for those who present with difficulties in that particular academic outcome. The findings documented here illustrate the need for more nuanced approaches to understanding the relationship between intervention and academic performance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.