For the first time in the history of the mental health disciplines, major resources are flowing into treatment research to attempt to determine what works in everyday clinical practice. In the next few years, we should be equipping practitioners with things that can really work in their hands. I am hoping we will see a substantial difference in practice areas like adolescent depression and manic depressive illness within five years. It's also offering a large variety of support to help the field build expertise in this research. In fact, say some, this new emphasis could make significant differences for practice fairly quickly.
Some practitioners do have concerns with the new initiative, however.
They worry that the new research focus will have too narrow an entrance point and therefore narrow results. Development of interventions for understudied high-risk behaviors and events, such as suicide attempts or exposure to traumatic events and understudied mental disorders and behavioral problems. Studies on whether psychoeducational approaches work for all types of families and when individual family psychoeducation should be used instead of group. Examining risk and protective processes associated with co-morbid mental and medical disorders, such as heart disease and depression, anxiety disorders and cancers. Research collaborations between academic health centers and health-care organizations oriented to community care, with access to large, stable and diverse patient populations.