How Young Adults with Serious Mental Health Diagnoses Navigate Poverty Post-emancipation: The Complex Roles of Community Mental Health Services & Informal Social Support.

Serious mental health diagnoses are prevalent among youth who "age out" of foster care by reaching the maximum age for child welfare service eligibility. Post-emancipation, little is known about how youth engage in community mental health services, or leverage informal social networks, to navigate independence. Twenty emancipating youth completed three interviews over 16 months.

Evaluating and sustaining Coordinated Specialty Care for a recent onset of psychosis in non-academic-affiliated community mental healthcare settings.

Purpose: To improve sustainability of Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) for a recent onset of psychosis, a better understanding is needed regarding how non-academic-affiliated community mental health centers blend CSC service elements and select key performance metrics to evaluate their approach.

Methods: A quality and evaluation team embedded within a large community mental health center partnered with CSC site leadership to implement CSC and design a program evaluation strategy informed by CSC research literature. Clinical, family, vocational, and psychiatry services participation, exits, key performance indicators, and standardized measures were examined for participants (n = 47) enrolled for 12-months.

Developing a community-based multidisciplinary service exit typology for young adults with serious mental health conditions.

Increasingly, community mental health providers are implementing multidisciplinary treatment models blending child and adult evidence-based practices to boost young adult engagement. Although promising, limited research examines how and why young adults disengage from these new models. This study examines provider documentation of treatment discharges to create a more developmentally-attuned young adult service exit typology.

Meeting the Developmental Needs of Young Adults Diagnosed with Serious Mental Health Challenges: the Emerge Model.

Adult providers struggle to engage 18-25-year olds despite high rates of serious mental health challenges observed among this age group. A new model, called "Emerge," combines the intensive outreach and multidisciplinary team-based approach used in Assertive Community Treatment with Positive Youth Development principles and practices used in the Transition to Independence Process Model. Emerge bridges youth and adult services, focuses on supporting transition-to-adulthood milestone achievement, and is a sister team to Coordinated Specialty Care for recent psychosis onset.

Implementing Adapted Individual Placement and Support (IPS) Supported Employment for Transition-Age Youth in Texas.

Transition-age youth (TAY, ages 14-26) diagnosed with serious mental health conditions are at high risk for vocational struggles. This paper examines the implementation and process evaluation of Individual Placement and Support (IPS) and Supported Employment enhanced to better meet developmental needs of TAY. Enhancements include the integration of a TAY development focus, engagement best-practices, Supported Education and Peer Support.

Developing quality assurance practices and measures for implementing and sustaining the Transition to Independence Process (TIP) model.

Objective: For interventions, like the Transition to Independence Process (TIP) Model, to be implemented effectively, efficient and accessible quality assurance tools are needed. The purpose of this article is to describe the process of developing an online staff self-report quality assurance tool for a key process in the TIP Model: the TIP Solution Review (TSR) and to provide data on the acceptability and perceived impact of both the measure and the TSR process.

Method: We used an iterative approach to pilot test and seek feedback from multidisciplinary teams trained in TIP.

Adapting supported employment for emerging adults with serious mental health conditions.

Effective services are needed to assist young people with serious mental health conditions to successfully transition to employment or education, especially among those with intensive adolescent mental health service utilization. To meet these needs, the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model of supported employment was adapted and its feasibility was tested in a psychiatric treatment program for early-emerging adults. Participants were 17-20 years old (mean age = 18.

Launching into adulthood from institutional care with a serious mental health condition.

This qualitative study explores the experiences of emerging adults with serious mental health conditions (e.g., bipolar disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder) before and after they emancipate from the child welfare system and exit a transitional living program.