Caregivers of young people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) or BPD features experience significant burden and distress and often lack effective coping strategies. A family environment of pervasive invalidation can contribute to the disorder and work against effective coping. Consequently, some psychotherapy interventions for young people with BPD or BPD features aim to incorporate caregivers in treatment to varying degrees.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychiatry Res
February 2025
Community-based youth mental health (YMH) platforms are challenging to evaluate. Using a multi-method approach, we examined the efficacy of an integrated YMH program in Hong Kong. The real-world outcomes of 1047 participants were compared with a propensity score (PS) matched control group randomly selected from the community (study 1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Prim Care Community Health
November 2024
Objective: Mental health problems and vocational disengagement are often linked for young people in a self-reinforcing cycle. Integrated Individual Placement and Support (IPS) services can help to not only overcome educational/vocational challenges but also improve mental wellbeing.
Methods: In a matched cohort study, we compared improvement rates in mental health and wellbeing outcomes for young people aged 15 to 25 who had received at least two integrated IPS services with those who had received standard youth mental health services only.
Background: Digital, or eHealth, interventions are highly promising approaches to help adolescents improve their health behaviours and reduce their risk of chronic disease. However, they often have low uptake and retention. There is also a paucity of high-quality research into the predictors of eHealth engagement, and a lack of studies that have systematically evaluated existing engagement strategies in adolescent populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Soc Psychiatry
November 2024
Aim: Young people's participation in their own mental healthcare requires ways for them to provide feedback to their clinicians on how they are experiencing their treatment. Key dimensions of session experience are willingness to attend, feeling listened to and understood, working on issues important to them, feeling hopeful for the future and feeling that things are improving in their lives. This study reports on young people's session experiences over time and by key demographics for headspace youth mental health services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAust N Z J Psychiatry
September 2024
Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of integrated models of mental healthcare in enhancing clinical outcomes, quality of life, satisfaction with care and health service delivery outcomes in young people aged 12-25 years. A secondary objective was to identify common components of integrated mental health interventions.
Methods: A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies published 2001-2023 that assessed clinical or health service use outcomes of integrated care, relative to treatment as usual, for any mental health condition in 12-25 years old accessing community-based care.
Introduction: Evaluating service quality and satisfaction is central to the provision of accessible and developmentally appropriate youth mental health services. However, there are limited suitable measures and a lack of published evidence on the psychometric properties of measures to assess young people's satisfaction with youth mental health services. The headspace Youth (Mental Health) Service Satisfaction Scale (YSSS) was designed and implemented to assess young people's satisfaction with headspace mental health services in Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The 'My youth mental health Session Experience' (MySE) measure was developed by headspace, Australia's National Youth Mental Health Foundation, in collaboration with young people, for use as a routine session experience measure across its national centre service network. The measure fills a gap in measures needed to implement measurement-informed care in youth mental health care.
Participants And Methods: Routinely collected data from 37,201 young people aged 12 to 25 years who commenced an episode of care at one of the 150 headspace centres between 1 July 2021 and 30 June 2022 were used to validate the five-item measure.
Aim: Research on trends in youth mental health is used to inform government policy and service funding decisions. It often uses interviewer-administered surveys, which may be affected by mode effects related to social desirability bias. This study sought to determine the impact of survey administration mode on mental health measures, comparing mode effects for sensitive mental health measures (psychological distress and wellbeing) and non-sensitive (physical activity) measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOffenders who commit sexual offences against children are progressively recognised, prosecuted, assessed and treated. As technology advances, internet child sexual abuse material (I/CAM) offences increase in pertinence to forensic assessment and treatment. A new proposal in I/CAM therapeutics, the Estimated Risk of Internet Child Sexual Offending (ERICSO) is a framework for individualised, risk-relevant treatment formulation based on identified risk factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncidence of psychosis varies geographically due to factors such as social disadvantage. Whether this influences the clinical presentation and/or engagement of those experiencing psychosis remains relatively understudied. This study analysed data from young people across Australia accessing ultra-high risk (UHR) or first episode psychosis (FEP) services delivered through the headspace Early Psychosis (hEP) program between June 2017 and March 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research demonstrates that parents' communication skills may contribute to the development and maintenance of their young person's borderline personality disorder (BPD). Carers of people with BPD also experience their own psychosocial stressors and feel unsupported. Consequently, Dialectical Behavior Therapy for adolescents (DBT-A) invites parents to partake in group therapy alongside their young person.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAustralia's headspace initiative is world-leading in nation-wide youth mental healthcare reform for young people aged 12 to 25 years, now with 16 years of implementation. This paper examines changes in the key outcomes of psychological distress, psychosocial functioning, and quality of life for young people accessing headspace centres across Australia for mental health problems. Routinely collected data from headspace clients commencing an episode of care within the data collection period, 1 April 2019 to 30 March 2020, and at 90-day follow-up were analysed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The field of early psychosis has undergone considerable expansion over the last few decades and has a strong evidence base of effectiveness. Like all areas of healthcare, however, early psychosis services need to more consistently deliver higher quality care to achieve better outcomes for patients and families. A national clinical research infrastructure is urgently required to enable the sector to deliver the highest quality care and expand and translate evidence more quickly and efficiently.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: We describe a research program to advance youth mental health service research in Australia, addressing two core knowledge gaps: the lack of available routine outcome measures and lack of understanding of how to assess and monitor complexity and heterogeneity in illness presentation and trajectory.
Conclusions: Our research identifies better routine outcome measures (ROM) that are: designed specifically for the developmental nuances of the 12-25-year age range; multidimensional; and meaningful to young people, their carers, and service providers. Alongside much-needed new measures of complexity and heterogeneity, these tools will inform service providers to better meet the needs of young people presenting with mental health problems.
Purpose: Use of alcohol and other substances is a multifaceted issue impacting young people across multiple life domains. This paper aims to elucidate patterns of substance use and associated demographic and clinical factors among young people seeking treatment for their mental health.
Methods: Young people (12-25 years old) were recruited from five youth-specific primary mental health ("headspace") services in Australia.
Background: Substance use remains a barrier to recovery for young people accessing early intervention services for psychosis. While correlates of use have been explored in populations experiencing a first episode of psychosis (FEP), sample sizes have been small and less research assesses cohorts at ultrahigh risk of psychosis (UHR).
Methods: This study uses data from a naturalistic cohort including UHR and FEP participants (N = 1252) to elucidate clinical correlates of use in the past 3 months of any illicit substance, amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), cannabis, and tobacco.
Introduction: Opportunities for improved mental health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people lie in improving the capability of primary healthcare services to identify mental healthcare needs and respond in timely and appropriate ways. The development of culturally appropriate mental health assessment tools and clinical pathways have been identified as opportunities for strengthening workforce capacity in this area. The Ngalaiya Boorai Gabara Budbut implementation project seeks to pursue these opportunities by developing and validating a psychosocial assessment tool, understanding what services need to better care for your people and developing resources that address those needs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The authors aimed to evaluate changes in use of government-subsidized primary mental health services, through the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS), by young people during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia and whether changes were associated with age, sex, socioeconomic status, and residence in particular geographical areas.
Methods: Interrupted time-series analyses were conducted by using quarterly mental health MBS service data (all young people ages 12-25 years, 2015-2020) for individual Statistical Area Level 3 areas across Australia. The data captured >22.