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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (41)
Adults experiencing homelessness (AEH) have high rates of psychiatric conditions, face barriers to accessing psychiatric care, and are high emergency department (ED) utilizers, a setting often unable to address their complex health needs. This study assesses time trends and high frequency utilization by AEH in one psychiatric emergency services (PE...
Introduction
Suicidal behaviour is a major public health concern in Africa and a cause of premature mortality. The availability of community epidemiological data in Ethiopia is limited. This study assessed the prevalence of suicidal behaviour and its associated factors in Jimma Town, Southwest Ethiopia.
Methods
Using the Suicide Behaviour Question...
Middle schoolers with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) typically have a trajectory of difficult outcomes (e.g., school dropout, incarceration). Growing evidence suggests that the continuum of behavioral competence to challenges is closely linked to students’ neurocognitive executive function (EF) capacities, perceived stress...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic posed numerous obstacles to psychosocial wellbeing for children. We conducted a longitudinal study to evaluate child mental health and social risks during the pandemic.
Methods
Participants were 172 caregivers of children aged 6–11 years old who attended well child visits within 6 months before pandemic onset at an...
Background/Context
Culturally relevant education (CRE) is a powerful tool for improving students’ educational experiences and outcomes. Yet CRE is not the norm in U.S. public education systems (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011, 2012; Borrero et al., 2016; Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016), perhaps because teachers are socialized into systems that reproduce and up...
Objective
To document the experience of 14 academic child and adolescent psychiatry programs in transitioning to and managing telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal was to understand how programs adopted and sustained telehealth during the pandemic. Telehealth was defined as services delivered via videoconferencing and telephony...
Importance:
Psychiatric boarding occurs when patients needing intensive psychiatric services who are already under clinical supervision experience delays in their admission to psychiatric facilities. Initial reports have suggested that the US had a psychiatric boarding crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, little is known about the consequ...
Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) characteristically experience academic difficulties. There is growing evidence that the continuum from academic competence to underachievement is partially explained by executive function (EF; neurocognitive attention-regulation processes) and stress. Yet, there is scarce research investigating...
Cannabis use is associated with increased severity of psychotic symptoms and the risk of acute agitation and aggressive behavior in inpatient (IP) and outpatient settings. Whether or not cannabis use is associated with increased acuity of psychosis-related ED presentations and risk of repeat ED visits for psychosis is unclear. In this retrospective...
This study sought to characterize changes in the utilization of psychiatric emergency services among children and adolescents during distinct phases of 2020, as compared with prior years. We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records from January 2018 through December 2020 that included all encounters made by patients under age 2...
Objective:
To estimate changes in Boston Emergency Services Team (BEST) psychiatric emergency services (PES) encounter volume (total and by care team) and inpatient disposition during the first 8 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
Data on 30,657 PES encounters was extracted from the four-county, BEST reporting system. The study period con...
Background
Research shows that family involvement in psychosis treatment leads to better patient outcomes. Interventions that involve and counsel family members may improve patient outcomes by addressing barriers to treatment adherence and lowering family expressed emotion, thereby creating a less stressful and more supportive home environment. Lea...
Teachers contribute to the process of identifying and referring students for mental health services, however, relatively little is known about how they make those decisions and how decision-making differs across school contexts. This study used a vignette-based method to investigate individual and school contextual factors associated with the likel...
Rising psychiatric emergency department (ED) presentations pose significant financial and administrative burdens to hospitals. Alternative psychiatric emergency services programs have the potential to alleviate this strain by diverting non-emergent mental health issues from EDs. This study explores one such program, the Boston Emergency Services Te...
Background
Almost 80% of adolescents in the US have experienced a traumatic event, and approximately 7% have post-traumatic stress disorder. However, there is a lack of validated and feasible assessments for assessing traumatic stress symptoms in pediatric primary care, and traumatic stress symptoms are routinely unidentified. This study aimed to d...
We describe challenges to measuring the type and quantity of mental health programs, practices, and resources that schools provide to students, as well as variation in these resources. We conducted interviews and surveys with school and district staff representing 55 middle and high schools in MetroWest Massachusetts with the goal of collecting dat...
Importance The implications of extreme heat for physical health outcomes have been well documented. However, the association between elevated ambient temperature and specific mental health conditions remains poorly understood.
Objective To investigate the association between ambient heat and mental health–related emergency department (ED) visits i...
Objectives
To develop and assess the psychometric properties of the Adolescent Primary Care Traumatic Stress Screen (APCTSS), a five-item yes/no screener for PTSD symptoms in adolescents, and the first developed for pediatric primary care.
Study Design
The APCTSS was developed by combining and adapting the UCLA PTSD Reaction Index for DSM-5 with t...
Objective
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) disproportionately affects socioeconomically disadvantaged children, but for unclear reasons. We examined the association between social determinants of health (SDH) and ADHD symptoms in a national sample of preschool-age children.
Methods
We conducted exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and...
Background:
There is concern about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychosocial functioning among school-age children, who have faced unusual stressors during this time. Our goal was to assess mental health symptoms and social risks during COVID-19, compared to before the pandemic, for urban, racial and ethnic minority school-age children,...
Many schools and communities conduct regular surveillance surveys to monitor student mental health risk. These surveys rarely ask about use of mental health services, despite the potential importance of this information to support service planning and resource allocation. The current study developed and tested the Adolescent Mental Health Support S...
Objective
A consortium of eight academic child and adolescent psychiatry programs in the United States and Canada examined their pivot from in-person, clinic-based services to home-based telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aims were to document the transition across diverse sites and present recommendations for future telehealth service pl...
Working conditions may be an important lever to support special educators’ reading instruction for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). Thus, we explored how working conditions relate to the quality of special educators’ reading instruction in upper elementary, self-contained classes for students with EBD. Using mixed methods to...
PurposeStudies document the substantial underutilization of mental health services by US Latinos in young adulthood. Rates of service use are higher in childhood, raising questions about whether mental health service use during childhood may facilitate access to services later in life. This article examines the extent to which utilization of mental...
Teachers have an important role in identifying, supporting, and referring students with mental health needs to school-based mental health providers. However, most teachers receive little or no preparation in this area. The present study examines the impact of one brief, single-session, online role-play simulation designed to prepare teachers to ide...
We evaluated the effectiveness of Boston vs. Bullies, a short-term, free, bullying prevention program that uses celebrity athletes to present content. Fifth-grade students in 10 schools were randomized to either complete the Boston vs. Bullies intervention (n = 388), or to a wait-list control group (n = 266). Pre- and post-surveys assessed knowledg...
Over half of adolescents have experienced a traumatic event in their lifetime and these experiences can have immediate and ongoing impacts on mental health, including diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, adjustment disorder, reactive attachment disorder, and disinhibited social engagement disorder. Adolescents who have...
This study examined the association of students’ life satisfaction with mental health risk and perceptions of school functioning (academic and social functioning). Participants were 1348 students (53.5% female) enrolled in grades 4 to 12 in a predominantly non-Latino white and middle-upper class public school district in the northeastern USA. Moder...
Objective: Bullying is characterized by differences in power between targets and aggressors. This study examines how experiences with power dynamics in childhood bullying are associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety in college.
Participants: First-year college students (N = 470) at four universities reported on childhood bullying victimiz...
A recent national survey found that bullying and cyberbullying were the top health concerns of US parents (Freed et al., 2017). Worldwide, there has been a rapid increase in attention to bullying. Over the past two decades many states have enacted legislation addressing bullying, particularly in response to news stories and research evidence linkin...
Bullying is aggression that is intentional, repeated, and involves a power imbalance between target and aggressor. Studies find that the perception of power imbalance is associated with particularly negative outcomes for targets of bullying; however, limited research has focused on methods for assessing power imbalance, or how power is perceived by...
