The School of Family Life’s Marriage and Family Therapy program put together a new program titled the Marriage and Family Therapy Practice Research Network (MFT-PRN) in 2017. This program is designed to help student therapists improve their skills from the beginning.
Professor Lee Johnson, a BYU School of Family Life professor and faculty director for the program, says, “This project is all about trying to improve mental health care. There's not enough therapists, there's lots of people with mental illnesses, and there's lots of problems with families. And so we are trying to solve that at multiple levels.”
In order to assist therapists in tracking the progress of their clients, this program uses different assessments taken by therapy clients to gather data.
Abby Charlesworth, the current project manager of MFT-PRN, says that the assessments she sends before the first session have helped her better understand her patients.
“It’s a really good way to gauge their responses. You can think, ‘Ok, they brought this up in their assessment. I’m interested to see if they will bring it up in the session.' It may show that they’re super depressed but maybe that’s not their main concern,” Charlesworth says.
She explains how the program is a tool used to highlight areas that might not necessarily come up in conversation, so she can focus on them.
The MFT-PRN has impacted the process for training therapists by taking the findings, reassessing what’s effective and applying changes, shares Johnson.
“We're trying to improve training, client care, and do research on how to improve therapy. We're attacking that mental health crisis in all the places we can,” he says.
Min Xu, a former BYU doctoral student, now works as a marriage and family therapy professor at the University of San Diego. Xu was a clinician, researcher, and project contributor in translating the data in the MFT-PRN to Mandarin and Cantonese.
Xu says that, when conducting research, the organic process of obtaining data allows therapists to use their data to “generate findings and clinical implications, and take those implications back to therapy. These results help further improve our current evidence-based practice with clients.”
Two years ago, when the network first launched, Steven M. Harris, editor for the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy, wrote a keynote address acknowledging the contribution of research stemming from Brigham Young University.
Harris, a BYU alum and current professor at the University of Minnesota, says that the MFT-PRN is composed of several family therapy training programs from different universities across the nation.
These programs are able to gather data through their own on-campus clinics, like the Comprehensive Clinic on BYU campus, explains Harris. By using the MFT-PRN, professionals in the marriage and family therapy field can pool their data together to better assist in research.
Completing clinical research is not easy, Harris adds.
“If you're going to pilot a test, or examine the effectiveness of a particular intervention, you've got to get a lot of people to be in that intervention. And it's hard to do that in one single setting,” he says.
If you can get that intervention pilot tested in various settings, he continues, you increase the diversity of your sample, which increases the accessibility of that intervention.
“It's one of the ways of capitalizing on the economies of scale for programs that may struggle to be competitive in grants,” Harris explains.
The program, so far, has been able to shorten treatment, change the course of treatment and help people get better treatment, according to Johnson.
The MFT-PRN offers a plethora of data in different languages, a feat Johnson is proud of.
Xu adds, “I feel really grateful that we are not just focusing on the English version. I think this will really broaden the impact of the MFT-PRN project so that it can also connect clinicians.”
Charlesworth says she has seen, in her own work, how the MFT-PRN positively affects couples. By referencing data that tracks couples' progress, she is able to show them how successful their visits have been, often urging them to celebrate that milestone.
Johnson states, “It's not a real sexy project, like some projects highlighted in the media and elsewhere, but it has a big impact. It's a simple project that impacts mental health treatment in multiple ways.”
Since the launching of the program, the MFT-PRN has been used in 24 peer-reviewed articles, many presentations around the world, and there are many more articles in process.
Learn more about the program at the MFT-PRN website.