Festschrift for Leonard Bickman: Introduction to The Future of Children's Mental Health Services Special Issue.

This introductory article describes the genesis of the Festschrift for Leonard Bickman and of this Festschrift special issue entitled, The Future of Children's Mental Health Services. The special issue includes a collection of 11 original children's mental health services research articles, broadly organized in accordance with three themes (i.e.

Communication training improves patient-centered provider behavior and screening for soldiers' mental health concerns.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of patient-centered communication training for military providers who conduct post-deployment health screening. The half-day interactive workshop included simulated Soldier patients using video technology.

Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, all health care providers at four military treatment facilities were recruited for data collection during a four- to nine-day site visit (23 trained providers, 28 providers in the control group, and one provider declined to participate).

Feedback mechanisms of change: How problem alerts reported by youth clients and their caregivers impact clinician-reported session content.

Objective: This study explored how clinician-reported content addressed in treatment sessions was predicted by clinician feedback group and multi-informant cumulative problem alerts that appeared in computerized feedback reports for 299 clients aged 11-18 years receiving home-based community mental health treatment.

Method: Measures included a clinician report of content addressed in sessions and additional measures of treatment progress and process (e.g.

Implementing a Measurement Feedback System: A Tale of Two Sites.

A randomized experiment was conducted in two outpatient clinics evaluating a measurement feedback system called contextualized feedback systems. The clinicians of 257 Youth 11-18 received feedback on progress in mental health symptoms and functioning either every 6 months or as soon as the youth's, clinician's or caregiver's data were entered into the system. The ITT analysis showed that only one of the two participating clinics (Clinic R) had an enhanced outcome because of feedback, and only for the clinicians' ratings of youth symptom severity on the SFSS.

Overview of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol misuse among active duty service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, self-report and diagnosis.

Previous studies have found deployment to combat areas to be associated with an increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and alcohol abuse, but many previous studies were limited by samples that were not representative of the deployed military as a whole. This study presents an overview of these three mental health problems associated with deployment among Air Force, Army, Marine Corp, and Navy service members returning from deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan between January 2007 and March 2008. With postdeployment health data on over 50,000 service men and women, including diagnostic information, we were able to estimate prevalence of those who screened positive for risk of each disorder in self-report data at two time points, as well as prevalence of diagnoses received during health care encounters within the military health care system.