Engaging young people in early psychosis services – a challenge for social work

Social Work Training Intervention to Increase Referral Rates for Preventive Psychosis Services: A Randomized Trial

“…The social work profession has significant influence across all sectors of community-based agencies in the United States, including public schools, child services, housing, healthcare, behavioral health, and justice. The growing recognition of socio-environmental factors as causes and determinants of the course of schizophrenia (Anglin, Galea, & Bachman, 2020;Anglin et al, 2021;Tandon, Keshavan, & Nasrallah, 2008), along with the ascendance of recovery-oriented treatments (Dixon et al, 2015), has paralleled an expanded role for the social work profession to facilitate early intervention via integration of prevention services into current community-based service models (Beckwith, Briggs, Shapiro, & Carrasco, 2021;DeVylder, 2016). Such community services may not have the resources to directly treat psychosis, but they do have the capacity to rapidly screen a broad cross section of at-risk youth and young adults and to make appropriate referrals.…”