Exploring the Use of the Interactive Systems Framework to Guide School Mental Health Services in Post‐disaster Contexts: Building Community Capacity for Trauma‐Focused Interventions

Abstract

Over the past two decades schools have been identified as the de facto mental health system for youth. Therefore, improving and expanding school mental health (SMH) has become a pressing agenda item for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and funders. Advancing this agenda includes not only translating intervention research into practice within schools, but building capacities for these interventions to occur. The interactive systems framework (ISF) of Wandersman and colleagues, and the focus of this special issue, provides guidance in bridging the gap between research and practice through multisystem capacity building. There is some evidence that application of the ISF has helped to build capacity for SMH in states, but this evidence is preliminary. In addition, application of the ISF has not occurred in SMH at the community level or in relation to the specific stresses a community undergoes in relation to a disaster. The purpose of this article was to conduct a preliminary attempt to connect these three areas-the ISF, SMH and strengthening SMH through the ISF to better address impacts of a community level disaster; in this case, we explore the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans schools, their students and families, and SMH programming within them.

Trauma-Informed Practices in Schools Across Two Decades: An Interdisciplinary Review of Research

“…Teachers and other school personnel find working with students affected by trauma challenging (Souers, 2018), and though they are part of a larger child service system of care that includes the school (National Child Traumatic Stress Network, Schools Committee, 2017), they may not necessarily be fully integrated within those systems in terms of understanding their roles and responsibilities or in implementing or delivering practices (Perry & Daniels, 2016). In cases of natural disasters and other community-wide events, teachers and other school-based providers are also affected by the same challenges as students (Taylor, Weist, & DeLoach, 2012). Likewise, teachers may not feel prepared to take on those responsibilities or may resist doing so, particularly when considering contextual factors such as poverty (Blitz, Anderson, & Saastamoinen, 2016).…”

Consultation as an Implementation Strategy for Evidence-Based Practices Across Multiple Contexts: Unpacking the Black Box

“…Placing consultation within a larger framework is important because consultationfocused on a singular innovation is likely not a sustainable implementation strategy on its own. The ISF was developed in reaction to other implementation models which were largely focused on unidirectional transmission of information, from researchers to the community, and has been increasingly identified as a useful way to think about dissemination and implementation efforts (e.g., Chinman et al, 2012; Halgunseth et al, 2012; Lesesne et al, 2008; Smythe-Leistico et al, 2012; Taylor, Weist, & Deloach, 2012; Wandersman et al, 2008). Despite the relatively young discipline of implementation science, over sixty-one models have already been identified in dissemination and implementation science (Tabak, Khoong, Chambers, & Brownson, 2012).…”

Reflections on “Building Back Better” Child and Adolescent Mental Health Care in a Low-Resource Postemergency Setting: The Case of Sierra Leone

“…According to the developers, the ISF is primarily descriptive but is also meant to improve the dissemination and implementation process (14). While initially developed for the field of primary prevention, the ISF has also been applied in the fields of secondary and tertiary prevention in health and mental health (15–18). In 2018, it was for the first time successfully used in a low-resource context (19).…”