Collaborating with Parents with Lived Experience to Improve State-Delivered Children's Mental Health Care Services
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Here at the IDEAS Center, we don't provide treatment for children's mental health problems, but instead, partner with those that do – providers, policymakers, and parent advocates – to build a better set of mental health care services for children and families.
IDEAS researchers collaborate with providers, policymakers, and most importantly, parents/caregivers and youth, whose lived experiences help to develop and test new ways to improve the quality of the mental health treatments that children and families receive. A key ingredient to building better mental health services for kids is collaborating with parents/caregivers/youth who have been there: parents/caregivers of youth with mental health problems, and youth themselves, who have lived experience seeking mental health services. Parents/caregivers and youth with this lived experience often become Family Peer Advocates, and are trained and credentialed members of a mental health care treatment team. For nearly two decades, IDEAS researchers and family peer advocates have collaborated to build higher-quality mental health services for children and their families. Services that are child- and family-centered. Services that take into account the needs of the family as a whole. And services that are based on what science says are the best available and most effective treatments for children and adolescents with mental health disorders. Working collaboratively with parent advocates (and state policymakers and mental health providers), IDEAS researchers have built a significant knowledge base on family and youth support services over the last two decades. We have studied, in-depth, family peer advocate duties, leading to a better definition of their roles on treatment teams. We have identified those factors or qualities that make an effective family peer advocate (FPA), and have developed quality indicators for the programs and organizations in which they work. We have also developed and tested a family peer advocate training program, known as the Parent Empowerment Program, or PEP, to train FPA's; PEP is now a required training for all FPAs in NYS. We have also studied how best to integrate family peer advocates into treatment teams. Family peer advocates are a critical component of our research team. The IDEAS Center Family Peer Advocates, Ms. Geraldine "Gerry" Burton and Ms. Priscilla Shorter, help to guide the design of our studies, their deployment in community settings, and most importantly, frame critical discussions around the interventions developed, and specifically, helping to synchronize intervention goals and parent and child-defined and family-preferred outcomes. |
IDEAS Family Peer Advocates
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Please note: If you are seeking treatment for your child's mental health concerns, please visit the NYU Child Study Center
for more information about mental health disorders, or to make an appointment to see a mental health professional.
for more information about mental health disorders, or to make an appointment to see a mental health professional.
