CRISIS INTERVENTION DIVORCE

Crisis Intervention Divorce

Crisis Intervention: Divorce

Introduction

Community outreach activities showed that adolescents and parents in Monroe County, New York, had difficulty identifying and accessing mental health crisis services for youths. The need to address this deficit led to the development of an educational workshop on teen depression and suicide. Local, national, and international trends in teen suicide led the authors to suggest a proactive, preventive educational approach that includes both primary and secondary prevention modalities, made directly available to teens, parents, and youth professionals. Additionally, the program developed new partnerships between mental health agencies and schools through workshops and workshop presenter training. The workshop described in this article informs and educates adolescents, adults working with adolescents, and parents about child and adolescent depression and suicide. The workshop is part of a preventive approach to two serious problems that affect a limited but growing segment of the adolescent population. In this case, it fits well within the mission of the Youth Emergency Services (YES) consortium, which includes increasing the community's awareness of serious child and youth mental health problems.

Comprehensive, collaborative community programs offering child and youth emergency mental health services are still relatively new, and much remains to be learned about the population in need of these services. The initial experience of Youth Emergency Services was one of coming to terms with the severity and complexity of the needs presented by families seeking services. Many adolescents, however, do not obtain the services they need because the services are not known to them or to their families, or are not perceived to be readily accessible. Since 1991, the YES consortium has offered immediate access and a comprehensive array of emergency services to children and adolescents under 18 years of age who have serious emotional problems and who reside in Monroe County in upstate New York (Jacobs 2001). Families and youths are assisted in a team-based program involving the collaboration of six community agencies, including four hospital-based community mental health centers in Rochester, New York: Crestwood Children's Center, Park Ridge Mental Health Center, Rochester Mental Health Center, and The Genesee Hospital Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health Center. Hillside Children's Center and the Strong Memorial Hospital Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry are also part of the consortium. Coordinated outpatient, respite, mobile, and home-based services are available to families as a means of maintaining children in their homes.

The rationale for developing an educational workshop emerged from information gathered in previous program outreach activities. For example, 97 African American and Latino parents and youths participated in one outreach project. Divided into 10 small groups, they brainstormed about help-seeking difficulties, specifically, impediments to obtaining mental health care services and accessing child and youth crisis services (Toolan 2004). Five community agencies serving African American and Latino clients collaborated on the project. The outcomes clearly showed that there was a need in minority communities for good public information about crisis resources and for a better understanding of the services ...