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Traditional Workshop - Ticketed

Transdiagnostic

CANCELLED: Principle-Guided Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: An Introductory Institute for the FIRST Program

Workshop 13 - CANCELLED: Principle-guided Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: An Introductory Institute for the FIRST Program

Saturday, November 16, 2024
8:00 AM – 11:00 AM EST
Location: 414/415, Level 4, Downtown Marriott
Earn 3 Credit
Ticketed Session
Keywords: Child, Adolescents, Transdiagnostic
Level of Familiarity: All
Recommended Readings: Weisz, J.R., & Bearman, S.K., (2020). Principle-Guided Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: The FIRST Program for Behavioral and Emotional Problems. Guilford Publishers.,   Cho, E., Bearman, S. K., Woo, R., Weisz, J. R., & Hawley, K. M. (2020). A second and third look at FIRST: Testing adaptations of a principle-guided youth psychotherapy. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 1-14.,   Weisz, J., Bearman, S. K., Santucci, L. C., & Jensen-Doss, A. (2017). Initial test of a principle-guided approach to transdiagnostic psychotherapy with children and adolescents. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 46(1), 44-58,   Bearman, S. K. & Weisz, J. R. (2015) Comprehensive treatments for youth comorbidity: Evidence-guided approaches to a complicated problem. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 20, 131-141. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12092,   Marchette, L. K., & Weisz, J. R. (2017). Practitioner Review: Empirical evolution of youth psychotherapy toward transdiagnostic approaches. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(9):970–984. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.12747.
Behavioral health clinicians are expected to use evidence-based treatments (EBTs) with their clients, yet EBTs do not always fit easily into busy, complex care systems. Limited time to learn numerous separate EBTs in order to cover a diagnostically broad caseload, highly comorbid clients requiring more than one targeted treatment, and the need to flex to manage emerging events all pose challenges. Feeling Calm, Increasing Motivation, Repairing Thoughts, Solving Problems, and Trying the Opposite (FIRST) is a brief and efficient approach to treatment that allows clinicians to use evidence-based treatments more flexibly with youth clients. The treatment has been found to be feasible and acceptable in community mental health clinics and was found to improve clinical outcomes relative to comparison benchmarks in both an open trial in community mental health clinics (Weisz, Bearman, Santucci & Jensen-Doss, 2017) and in an academic training clinic when treatment was constrained to only six sessions (Cho, Bearman, Woo, Weisz & Hawley, 2019). The workshop will provide an introduction to this transdiagnostic approach that addresses the following single and co-occurring problem areas: anxiety, depression, PTSD, disruptive behaviors. Participants will learn how to make evidence-based clinical decisions using the FIRST algorithms which are guided by transdiagnostic principles of change. The workshop will include didactics and clinical case examples presented via trainer role plays and video exemplars. Participants will demonstrate the ability to utilize FIRST algorithms in clinical decision-making via role plays and other experiential exercises.

Outline:
- Evidence-based treatments (EBTs) don’t fit well in complex care systems where youth clients are diagnostically comorbid, and clinicians have large, diverse caseloads.
- FIRST, an evidence-based transdiagnostic treatment for youth, utilizes transdiagnostic principles of change to address the needs of real-world clinicians and clients.
- Participants will be introduced to five principles of change: Feeling Calm, Increasing Motivation, Repairing Thoughts, Solving Problems, and Trying the Opposite.
- Participants will learn how to make evidence-based clinical decisions using FIRST algorithms to address the needs of youth clients with single and co-occurring problems in the following areas: anxiety, depression, PTSD, disruptive behaviors.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this session, the learner will be able to:
  1. Describe what transdiagnostic treatments are.
  2. Provide rationale for the utilization of transdiagnostic treatments.
  3. Describe the focus of treatment for each of the problems (e.g., anxiety, depression, PTSD, disruptive behaviors) treated by FIRST.
  4. Demonstrate effective use of FIRST strategies and skills during role play with fellow attendees.
  5. Make decisions on next steps for treatment for example cases based on FIRST algorithms.
  6. Long-term Goal: Learners will utilize principles of change to guide clinical decision- making in their clinical practice.