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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

clinical evaluative norms, residential setting, treatment, mental health

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Providing feedback to clinicians has been shown to reliably increase duration of treatment and leads to significantly improved outcomes in adult populations (Lambert et al., 2001), though little has been done for youth populations. Using feedback systems aid clinicians by allowing means for them to obtain valuable information about the baseline and contributors to a patient’s mental illness as well as the progression of the patient throughout treatment. This study used this notion of feedback to utilize a new psychotherapy outcome measure, the Treatment Support Measure (TSM) in the context of a youth residential treatment center (RTC) setting to determine if the measure provides positive actionable feedback to clinicians treating patients who suffer from acute psychopathology. The TSM is intended to help clinicians recognize baselines and progression of patients in certain domains of life (self-efficacy, social support, treatment motivation, and therapeutic alliance), of which have been connected with improvement in treatment and symptomatic psychological distress via previous research. This measure has previously been tested in both clinical and non-clinical youth community samples and has shown strong reliability and validity (Green, Merrill & Warren, 2010; Herzog, et. al, 2012). However, this measure has yet to be tested in a RTC; thus the purpose of this study is to obtain clinical norms to predict if the TSM is effective in a RTC setting, just as it is in community mental health settings. The RTC will then be able to take this information to better track the therapeutic progress of their patients and hopefully help relieve them of their psychological distress.

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