Building Competencies and Skills Among Service Providers Working with Young Peop
Building Competencies and Skills Among Service Providers Working with Young People who Experience Serious Mental Health Conditions: State of the Science
This paper explores what is currently known about the most promising strategies for increasing providers’ capacity to deliver effective behavioral health services and supports. The paper also describes how this information has been—or could be—applied to the design of cutting-edge approaches for building skills and competencies among providers that work with young people who experience serious mental health conditions.
Need for developmentally- appropriate service and support strategies
Evidence produced in recent years has drawn attention to the idea that the services and supports that are typ- ically available for emerging adults with serious mental health conditions (SMHCs) tend to be neither engaging nor developmentally optimal (Kessler, Demler, & Frank, 2005; Pottick, Bilder, & Vander Stoep, 2008; U. S. Government Accountability Office, 2008). In fact, while young people in this age range experience the highest rates of SMHCs, they are also the population group least likely to engage in behavioral health services, and this is particularly true for young people from racial and ethnic minorities (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2015, 2017).
Recognizing this gap between need and uptake, researchers and service providers have responded by describing and developing promising new approaches specifically designed to meet the unique needs of emerging adults with SMHCs, and a small number of these approaches have been tested to the extent that they can be described as “empirically supported” (i.e., supported by evidence; Walker & Gowen, 2011, 2012; Walker et al., 2013). Many of these approaches share a core of key practice principles that are intended to promote engagement, good working relationships, and the activation of change processes. Typically, the principles encourage practitioners to work with young people in ways that are strengths-based and driven by the young person’s perspectives and priorities.
Additional shared principles stress the importance of helping the young person to acquire skills for increasing self-determination, as well as skills for building relationships and/or social capital, through connections to supportive adults and peers, and through connections to development-enhancing contexts (Walker 2015; Walker & Flower, 2015). “Studies have shown that providers using “treatment as usual” very rarely used element of either evidence-based or best practices, despite frequently believing that they were doing so.”
As a complement to efforts to design new approaches specifically for young/emerging adults, the field has also seen initial efforts to adapt and test evidence-based practices (EBPs) that have been shown to be effective for children, adolescents, or adults generally. Discussions of the processes for adapting EBPs so that they are optimal for emerg