Annual Social Work Conference

Annual Social Work Conference

Cross diagnostic treatments for behavioral and emotional disorders in adults, adolescents, and children

Evidence-based mental health treatments (EBTs), on average, outperform treatment-as-usual, but there are multiple barriers to use them. First, selecting an appropriate EBT among the hundreds that have been developed can be overwhelming. Second, many EBTs require extensive post-graduate training which can be expensive and time consuming. Third, historically, EBTs have been developed for specific diagnoses or presenting problems. Most clinicians provide services to caseloads that include a range of different diagnoses and increasingly to clients with co-occurring conditions. This means that clinicians would need to master a battery of EBTs to address the myriad of presenting concerns in their caseloads. These challenges hamper EBT utilization.
Fortunately, there are EBTs designed to reduce these barriers. Transdiagnostic (I.e., cross-diagnostic) EBTs have been developed to provide a one-treatment solution for a wide variety of presenting problems. These treatments target core processes found across multiple disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, and other mood-related disorders). Clinicians are trained in one treatment and can customize it by selecting the most applicable modules for a client’s situation. Transdiagnostic approaches have been implemented at-scale in large public mental health systems. They are effective and efficient uses of agency resources.

OBJECTIVES

1. Conference participants will be able to provide rationale for the utilization of transdiagnostic treatments. 
   
2. Conference participants will be able to apply transdiagnostic treatment techniques in their clinical work.
   

Dr. Clair Robbins

Dr. Robbins is a licensed clinical psychologist. She currently works at Triangle Area Psychology Clinic, a private practice in Durham NC that is dedicated to providing evidence-based treatment to adolescents and adults as well as training grad students and postdocs to deliver these treatments. Dr. Robbins provides clinical services to adolescents and adults with a focus on treating emotion dysregulation and misophonia, a condition in which people are reactive to specific sounds (e.g., eating). She also provides supervision to trainees in the clinic. She is co-director of the Unified Protocol Institute. Dr. Robbins has published numerous peer-review papers on the development, adaptation, and evaluation of transdiagnostic treatments. She is co-author of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders and an expert international trainer in this treatment with 10 yearsDr. Robbins is the current co-director of the Unified Protocol Training Institute. She is a co-author on the current edition of the treatment manual, is a co-developer of the adherence criteria for the model, and is the co-developer of the model’s training materials. She has conducted U.P. trainings both domestically and internationally for 10 years. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers, many of which focus on evaluating evidence-based, transdiagnostic treatments. As part of her current clinical practice, she supervises clinicians learning the UP.

Dr. Sarah Kate Bearman

Dr. Sarah Kate Bearman is a clinical child psychologist and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Educational Psychology, and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Dell Medical School. Dr. Bearman’s research focuses on the effectiveness and implementation of empirically supported practices for youth and families in resource-limited publicly funded settings. She is interested in understanding how existing research about youth mental health treatment can be used to adapt, develop, or support interventions that are user-friendly, accessible, and sustainable in places where children and families receive services. She is the co-author of the treatment manual, Principle-Guided Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: The FIRST Program for Behavioral and Emotional Problems (Weisz & Bearman, 2020) and has been involved in a number of studies testing mental health interventions for youth in schools (Bearman, Bailin, Rodriguez & Bellevue, 2020), clinics (Weisz, Bearman, Santucci & Jensen-Doss, 2017), pediatric primary care (Bailin & Bearman, 2022), and with peer-support services (Bearman, Jamison, Lopez, Baker & Sanchez, 2022; Jamison et al., 2023). She is also interested in how clinical supervision can best support therapist competency in treatment (Bearman, Schneiderman & Zoloth, 2017), and the ways in which this can be leveraged in usual care settings (Bailin & Bearman, 2021). She provides both clinical supervision and national trainings for therapists in the use of treatment for anxiety, depression, disruptive conduct and traumatic stress.

For more information visit: https://swevents.byu.edu/