School Accommodations to Support Psychosocial Functioning and Self-Esteem in Adolescents with Long QT Syndrome

The current manuscript, as part of a larger program of research, intended to examine whether long QT syndrome (LQTS), a chronic and life-threatening genetic cardiac illness, impacts adolescents\u27 psychosocial functioning. After 2 1/2 years of involvement in the study and 13 months of attempted data collection, it was determined by the research team that the benefits of proceeding with an intervention plan outweighed the costs of waiting for data. Although the study was not able to be conducted within the anticipated time frame due to unforeseen logistical challenges, the study hypothesized that adolescents with higher ratings of self-reported social and school functioning have higher levels of self esteem (SE) and that social and co curricular restrictions, school accommodations, age of diagnosis, medical event frequency, social functioning, and school functioning predict ratings of SE. Given the hypothesized needs of the population and support based on previous literature and corroborating theories, this manuscript resulted in a detailed school-based accommodation plan, along with a crisis response plan, which will ultimately help advocate for the needs of adolescents with LQTS. The intervention plan will be revised as planned future work, once data has been obtained and analyzed and/or the intervention plan has been field tested

The Beck Initiative : training school-based mental health staff in cognitive therapy

A growing literature supports cognitive therapy (CT) as an efficacious treatment for youth struggling with emotional or behavioral problems. Recently, work in this area has extended the dissemination of CT to school-based settings. The current study has two aims: 1) to examine the development of therapists’ knowledge and skills in CT, an evidence-based approach to promoting student well-being, and 2) to examine patterns of narrative feedback provided to therapists participating in the program. As expected, school therapists trained in CT demonstrated significant gains in their knowledge of CT theory and in their demonstration of CT skills, with the majority of therapists surpassing the accepted threshold of competency in CT. In addition, an examination of feedback content suggested that narrative feedback provided to therapists most frequently consisted of positive feedback and instructions for future sessions. Suggestions for future research regarding dissemination of CT are discussed in light of increasing broad access to evidence based practices.peer-reviewe