Blog: Adolescent Mental Health - 2010

This just in: the final agenda/program for the Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness (JMATE) 2010 conference next week is out. 

• What presentations are you most excited about attending?
• If you can't be there, which ones do you most wish you could be there for?  What would be most useful for you in your work? 

• Helping Teens in Recovery Starts with a Simple Phone Call. The Science and Management of Addictions (SAMA) Foundation in Seattle is piloting a mentor-by-phone program that now supports 50 teens in recovery after completing substance abuse treatment. The pilot program, "The Recover2gether Project," offers weekly phone calls to teens and two other services. It's funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). 
• Also For Teens in Recovery: "Laughter Yoga." The idea is that laughter -- even fake laughter -- changes your breathing and mood in positive ways. Follow the link to watch teens in a sober high school in Oklahoma trying it out on video.   (Hat tip to the Association of Recovery Schools.)

•   How many youth are transferred from the juvenile justice system into the adult criminal justice system every year? No one knows. But the Bureau of Justice Statistics is initiating a study that should get us get closer to an answer to this an other questions about adult transfer practices. (Hat tip to Youth Today.)

• End the Byrne JAG formula grants? That's one of the Justice Policy Institute's (JPI) recommendations in a recent fact sheet on Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program spending. (JPI recommends replacing the formula grants with a competitive grant program focused on evidence-based programming.)

The JPI also recommended that juvenile justice funds be directed at "educational and community-based youth programming" and that substance abuse and mental health treatment services be funded through public health agencies, and not through the justice system: "By reaching people before they come in contact with the justice system, we can reduce future justice involvement and related costs, and reduce the chances that someone will have to deal with the collateral consequences of having a criminal record."

[The following checklist, which applies to both adult and adolescent substance abuse treatment, is reposted with permission of the author from his website, Selected Papers of William L. White. See below for attribution; slight edits have been made for ease of viewing and clarity (view the original here). -Ed.]
One of the best predictors of treatment quality is the use of assertive approaches to continuing care [for clients]. The checklist below is designed to identify the extent to which a program exemplifies such an approach. 

Just like the Transformer shown morphing above from a car into a robot, health reform will bring enormous changes for adolescent substance abuse treatment providers and behavioral healthcare agencies in general.
That's why it's important not to miss this one-hour webinar, "Medicaid Reform," on October 14, 2010 at noon PST / 3 pm EST. (Hat tip to Faces and Voices of Recovery.)
Sponsored by ACMHA (The College for Behavioral Healthcare Leadership), the webinar speaker will be Barbara Coulter Edwards, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Register here.
Questions? Email Kris Ericson, Executive Director of ACMHA.
Can't attend? Don't worry - all webinars will be archived with the rest of ACMHA's monthly webinar series on health reform legislation. 

Work for an adolescent substance abuse treatment and/or mental health treatment agency? Work with people who do? The training series described below from NIATx is not to be missed.  So pass it on! 
(Copy below taken with minor changes from the NIATx website.)
 

Will your Behavioral Health Organization Be Ready to Serve Patients in the New Environment Created by Health Reform?
The NIATx Accelerating Reform Collaborative (ARC) is a coaching/web-based learning program to help behavioral health providers prepare for health reform. It will help you:

• Assess your organization's readiness for health reform
• Fast track your thinking to plan for the future
• Find out what peers and experts are thinking and doing regarding health reform
• Receive valuable feedback from peers and experts on ideas you are considering
• Create a short/medium range action plan to help your organization adapt to a new way of doing business

Adapted from a post by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center Network:

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) is pleased to announce the availability of five six new e-learning courses for substance abuse treatment professionals:

• Prescription Medication (Part 1): Misuse, Abuse, and Dependence;
• Prescription Medication (Part 2): Addressing Addiction;
• Organizational Development: Governance and the Board of Directors;
• Organizational Development: Marketing as Collaboration; 
• Organizational Development: Using Financial Information as a Nonfinancial CEO; and
• Acamprosate: A New Medication for Alcohol Use Disorders

These courses provide an opportunity for professional growth as well as one continuing education unit per module for maintaining certification or licensure. Learn more.

These courses are a great development. Looking forward to SAMHSA adding more courses -- especially some that are specific to adolescent substance abuse treatment!

Last year, we posted about a hugely important study by the Center for Court Innovation. In it, young people reported that they did not receive a clear explanation of the juvenile justice system when they entered. Nor did they -- or their parents and guardians -- learn how their actions affected what happens in juvenile court. 
Our Reclaiming Futures site in Orange/Chatham Counties, North Carolina is trying to change this and created the video above for parents/guardians of youth entering juvenile court. Congratulations!  (They're also working on a handbook for youth; I'll share it when it's available.)
Has your jurisdiction done something similar? Leave a comment or drop me an email and we'll be glad to post it!

• Did you know that 60.6% of youths have witnessed violence and 46.3% have reported experiencing physical assault?

• Did you know that exposure to trauma, delinquency, and school failure are related? 

Chances are, trauma has affected many of the young people you work with in schools, child welfare, the juvenile justice system, or any other place where teens gather. 
That's why the Vulnerable Populations Portfolio at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is taking the unusual step of creating a time-limited online community forum, "Chronic Trauma and the Teen Brain -- foundation staff may direct funding to address the issue and want to know more about it. The goal of the forum is to learn from you—the expert—while connecting you to other experts.