Objective: As pediatric behavioral health concerns are increasingly identified and addressed within pediatric primary care and family medicine practices, behavioral health providers (BHPs) in integrated primary care (IPC) are often faced with not only addressing the psychosocial needs of their child patients, but also confronting the needs of those patients' caregivers. Given the extensive body of evidence demonstrating that child mental health is associated with caregiver mental health, continued discussions of addressing caregiver mental health within the integrated care context are warranted. Method: The current paper will discuss obstacles to establishing family-centered comprehensive behavioral care including ethical concerns around informed consent, scope of practice, and dual relations, and various practice considerations. Results: The obstacles are greater for establishing family-centered comprehensive behavioral care within pediatric settings compared to family practice settings due to the additional practice considerations. The potential benefit to children and the broader family system may warrant the effort. Conclusions: By identifying and discussing these issues, BHPs working within pediatric and family medicine settings are encouraged to engage in active dialogue with hospital and clinic administrators to overcome systemic barriers and to think flexibly about how BHPs might expand upon existing approaches in order to utilize the IPC opportunity to address parent mental health concerns that may otherwise impede a child's treatment progress.
Implications for Impact StatementTreating adult caregivers within pediatric primary or family care settings has the potential of vastly improving the mental health of the entire family. Integrated pediatric primary care provides an ideal setting for behavioral health providers to provide holistic family care. To do this effectively, ethical and practical barriers must be discussed and dismantled.
Study limitations included questions surrounding the validity of survey items to accurately assess PCP perceptions, lack of rigorous experimental design, and reliance on self-report data.
Psychotropic medications are being prescribed off-label by psychiatrists to treat preschool children diagnosed with internalizing disorders. In this review, the current state of evidence is presented for medications used to treat preschool children (ages 2–5 year olds) diagnosed with anxiety and/or depressive disorders. Eleven studies were systematically identified for this review based on a priori criteria. Overall, the available literature revealed that studies addressing the medication treatment of internalizing disorders in preschoolers are extremely limited and represent relatively weak research methodologies. Given the increasing prevalence of the use of psychotropic medications to treat preschool children and the unique challenges associated with working with this population, it is imperative that mental health practitioners are aware of the current, albeit limited, research on this practice to help make informed treatment decisions. Suggestions about how to monitor potential costs and benefits in those unique cases in which psychopharmacological treatments might be considered for young children are given. Moreover, areas of additional research for this population are discussed.
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