Adapting IPS for Young Adults: The Threshold Study

This webinar describes the Adapting Individual Placement Support (IPS) for Young Adults: The Thresholds study. The mission of the Transitions RTC is to improve the supports for youth and young adults, ages 14-30, with serious mental health conditions who are trying to successfully complete their schooling and training and move into rewarding work lives. The project with Thresholds tested a peer mentoring model for young people with serious mental health conditions who are working and going to school

A Theory of Change for One-on-One Peer support for older adolescents and young adults

Peer support has become increasingly available as a formal mental health service. However, high quality research and implementation of peer support has been hampered over the years by the lack of theory that clarifies peer support roles and explains exactly how these roles foster positive outcomes for peer support users. Observers have noted that theory is particularly sparse in regard to peer support for older adolescents and young adults, and they have called for theory that not only clarifies roles and mechanisms of impact, but also identifies how peer support for young people might differ from peer support for older adults This qualitative study brought young people with experience providing and using peer support together in small group discussions focused on understanding the activities and outcomes of peer support. This information was used to develop a theory of change that outlines key activities that constitute a one-on-one peer support role for young people, and describes how and why carrying out these activities should lead to positive outcomes. The theory highlights the characteristics of a successful “peerness-based relationship,” and proposes that the development of this kind of relationship mediates other positive outcomes from peer support. The article concludes with a discussion of how this theory can usefully inform the development and specification of peer support roles, training and supervision, and other organizational supports

Effectively Employing Young Adult Peer Providers: A Toolkit

This toolkit was developed specifically for provider organizations that employ or want to employ young adult peer providers, who we call “YA peers” in this toolkit. Provider and program leadership must support peers, co-workers and supervisors to work collaboratively through enhanced trainings, team building strategies, personnel policies, and sharing their enthusiasm for the potential of the YA peer role. This toolkit provides employers with direct guidance on how to enhance their capacity to sustain and grow a young adult peer workforce

Factors Supporting the Employment of Young Adult Peer Providers: Perspectives of Peers and Supervisors

Peer providers are a promising practice for transition-age youth community mental health treatment engagement and support, yet little is known about the experience of being a young adult peer provider or what helps to make an individual in this role successful. Utilizing a capital theory lens, this study uses data from focus groups (two with young adult peer providers and two with their supervisors) to examine facilitators of young adult peer provider success in community mental health treatment settings. Eight factors were identified as critical to young adult peer provider on-the-job success: persistence, job confidence, resilience, job training, skilled communications with colleagues, regular and individualized supervision, support from colleagues, and family support. Findings suggest that young adult peer providers may benefit immensely from an agency level focus on fostering social organizational capital as well as more individualized efforts to increase cultural, social, and psychological capital through training and supervision

Adapting Supported Employment for Emerging Adults with Serious Mental Health Conditions

Effective services are needed to assist young people with serious mental health conditions to successfully transition to employment or education, especially among those with intensive adolescent mental health service utilization. To meet these needs, the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model of supported employment was adapted and its feasibility was tested in a psychiatric treatment program for early-emerging adults. Participants were 17-20 years old (mean age = 18.5 years). Most were African American, under the custody of the state, with a primary mood disorder diagnosis. Adaptations to IPS included adding the following: near age peer mentors, a supported education component, and a career development focus. This open trial feasibility study tracked the model\u27s development, recruitment, and retention and tracked vocational and educational outcomes for 12 months. Model refinement resulted in the development of a separate educational specialist position, greater integration of the peer mentor with the vocational team, and further specification of the role of peer mentor. There was an 80% retention rate in the feasibility evaluation. Of the 35 participants, 49% started a job and/or enrolled in an education program over the 12-month period

Perspectives of Young Emerging Adults With Serious Mental Health Conditions on Vocational Peer Mentors

For early emerging adults with serious mental health conditions, vocational services with peer mentors are a promising adaptation of adult system evidence-based practices. Peer mentors were added to the Individual Placement and Support model of supported employment for 17- to 20-year-olds receiving residential and psychiatric care. To explore the feasibility of vocational peer mentors, open-ended satisfaction surveys and the Working Alliance Inventory were administered to mentees at 12 months. Thematic analysis of surveys reveals the importance of peer mentor authenticity, flexibility, and being a graduate of the mental health program where vocational services were based. Valued relational processes include the act of talking in the community, feeling understood, and forming a bond with peer mentors. Mentees with positive peer mentoring experiences reported stronger working alliances. This study sheds light onto near-age mentoring relational processes for this population, which can inform future research of mentoring processes and intervention design

Brief web-based interventions for young adult smokers with severe mental illnesses: A randomized, controlled pilot study

© 2017 The Author(s). Significance: About 50% of young adults with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other severe mental illnesses smoke tobacco, but few studies have evaluated interventions for this group. Methods: We conducted a randomized pilot study among 58 young adult smokers with severe mental illnesses comparing a brief interactive web-based motivational tool, Let\u27s Talk About Smoking, to computerized standard education from the National Cancer Institute. An additional 23 subjects received minimal tobacco assessment at baseline and no intervention, providing a comparison condition for naturalistic cessation behavior. All participants (total n = 81) were assessed for smoking and breath carbon monoxide at baseline and 14 weeks and had access to standard cessation treatments. Results: The 81 participants were stable outpatients ages 18-30 (mean 24.8 years): 43.2% were diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, the remainder with severe mood and anxiety disorders. They smoked 14.6 ± 10.2 cigarettes per day. All participants completed their assigned intervention; 83.4% of Let\u27s Talk About Smoking users and 71.4% of standard education users rated their intervention good or very good. At 14 weeks, less than 15% of participants in all conditions had used additional cessation treatment. Let\u27s Talk About Smoking users were more likely to have biologically verified abstinence at 14 weeks than standard education users (14.8% vs. 0%; X2 = 3.7, p = .05). None of the participants in the naturalistic comparison condition were abstinent at 14 weeks. Conclusions: Interactive, web-based motivational interventions are feasible and promising for smoking cessation among young smokers with severe mental illnesses. Such interventions warrant further study among this group of smokers. Implications: Young adult smokers with severe mental illnesses are a vulnerable population that, without intervention, goes on to experience disparate morbidity and mortality. Brief, easily disseminable interventions are needed to facilitate cessation in this group. This pilot research indicates that brief, technology-delivered, motivational interventions that are tailored for this group may be able to activate a significant number to quit without additional cessation intervention