The Intensive Mental Health Program meets the needs for services in school systems for children with serious emotional disturbances and for training graduate students in clinical applications with a difficult-to-serve population. We address the range of challenges and rewards experienced in the development of the comprehensive intervention…

Family-to-family services are emerging as an important adjunctive service to traditional mental health care and a vehicle for improving parent engagement and service use in children's mental health services. In New York State, a growing workforce of Family Peer Advocates (FPA) is delivering family-to-family services. We describe the development…

Given that the development of treatment fidelity assessment protocol is an integral but too frequently ignored aspect of clinical trials for psychological treatments, the Intensive Mental Health Program (IMHP) sought to build fidelity activities into training, program evaluation, and clinical recordkeeping from the outset of a 3 year study period.…

We describe changes in adaptive functioning for children enrolled in the Intensive Mental Health Program (IMHP), an innovative model for serving children with the most severe forms of SED. Most children show marked improvements in multiple indicators of role performance and symptomatology. Although a high risk, high need group, most children…

Outcomes are reported for youths with serious emotional disturbance receiving customary services from community mental health service providers who receive state mental health funds. Various outcome indicators for the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) are described, as well as a procedure for categorizing youths into client…