Expanding access and accelerating delivery of interventions to promote mental health for underserved adolescents - OVERALL PROJECT SUMMARY The overall goal of our transdisciplinary center for Expanding Access and Accelerating Delivery of Interventions to Promote Mental Health for Underserved Adolescents (ACCESS) is to improve the mental health of underserved youth, families, and school communities through an optimized, multi-tiered focus on contextual, behavioral, and individual systems. We focus the ACCESS center on testing effectiveness- implementation models of school-based prevention during the middle school years, a time when escalating rates of mental health distress in early adolescence culminate in mental health and behavioral disorders that can last a lifetime. Our center is guided by 3 primary aims: 1) Accelerate knowledge and dissemination of effective school-based interventions and practices; 2) Promote the center as a national resource on school- based interventions for mental health; and 3) Promote innovative analytic and data harmonization methods that accelerate the understanding of implementation mechanisms for and dissemination of school-based mental health intervention programs and practices. Supported by an Administrative Core and a Methods Core, our goal is to provide an overarching framework for both community and scholarly engagement and training as well as methodological support. Led by Drs. Stormshak and Seeley and building on our decades-long history of school-partnerships to promote mental health, the ACCESS center is composed of a transdisciplinary team that will support engagement with our school partners and a scientific advisory board. We will conduct research studies and pilot studies in mental health prevention that include opportunities for training early career scholars. A robust plan for dissemination of our results will provide rapid deployment opportunities for schools and communities across the US. Our Methods Core will support the design and testing of intervention and implementation mechanisms for school-based prevention programs and practices, including coordination of common data elements (CDE) and harmonization of data across projects. The Signature Project includes an adaptive SMART design delivered by school providers that will evaluate both a school- and family-level prevention model with targeted outcomes on systemic (school), family, and youth outcomes. Projects 1 and 2 test digital health models at the individual level to improve mental health outcomes through improvements in emotional regulation (P1) and healthy technology use (P2). Project 3 leverages a University of Oregon initiative in mental health prevention to test an innovative approach to develop workforce training and support for school-based providers to deploy evidence-based practices for improving youth mental health. Our ultimate goal is to transform delivery of school-based mental health promotion in adolescence and serve as a national resource for schools, researchers, and other providers as we seek to reduce mental health distress and behavioral problems from childhood through the young adult years.
