Youth Mental Health Needs and School/Clinic Service Use

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The sizeable gap between youth who need mental health services and those who actually receive them reflects a growing public health concern, the services allocation problem: without sufficient resources to treat all youth in need, service providers must identify the most severely pathological and impaired youth to allocate existing mental health services. In the reality of service systems, however, youth need competes against a myriad of non-need factors (e.g., family income, community resources, ethnicity) that have been shown to have an inequitable effect on service use. Recently, experts have asserted that school-based mental health care may address the services allocation problem better than traditional community clinics by providing services that are more equitable and responsive to youth mental health needs, yet the validity of this claim remains unclear. The current proposal aims to test an empirically-derived model of mental health needs (integrating psychopathology and impairment) against non-need factors in the prediction of school- and community-based service use to characterize patterns of inequitable service allocation and evaluate school-based services as an equitable and responsive service provider. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]