IMPROVING MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES WITH MULTICULTURAL ASSESSMENT OF CHILD, ADOLESCENT AND PARENT PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Abstract

To improve mental health services, it is essential that each case receive evidence-based assessment of problems and strengths on which to base plans for help. To help children and adolescents, parents must also be assessed and must be provided with feedback about relations between their functioning and their children’s needs. This presentation will report findings for children, adolescents, and parents from over 50 societies around the world. It will also explain use of the multicultural findings to construct multicultural norms and applications of multicultural norms to integrated clinical assessment of parents and their children, including, intake, progress, and outcome assessments designed to improve mental health services.

Thomas Achenbach is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and President of the Research Center for Children, Youth, and Families at the University of Vermont. A graduate of Yale University, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Child Study Center. Dr. Achenbach taught at Yale and was a Research Psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. He has been a DAAD Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Germany; an SSRC Senior Faculty Fellow at Jean Piaget’s Center in Geneva; Chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Child Psychopathology; and a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM‑III‑R committee. He has given over 400 invited presentations in 45 countries and has authored over 300 publications, including Developmental Psychopathology; Research in Developmental Psychology; Empirically Based Assessment of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (with Stephanie McConaughy); Multicultural Understanding of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (with Leslie Rescorla); and Manuals for the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA). ASEBA instruments have been translated into over 100 languages. Over 10,000 publications report their use in 100 societies and cultural groups. Dr. Achenbach’s honors include the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution Award for Clinical Child Psychology; the University of Vermont’s University Scholar Award; the Institute for Scientific Information’s Most Highly Cited Authors in the World Psychiatry/Psychology Literature; and election as a Fellow of the American Psychopathological Association and 4 Divisions of the American Psychological Association.