Youth Emergency Mental Health Response in Boston

PI: Jennifer Greif Green, PhD, Associate Professor, Special Education, BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
Co-PIs: Astraea Augsberger, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Social Work (SSW); Christina Borba, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, BU School of Medicine; Boston Medical Center; Margaret Carroll, PhD Student, BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development; Gloria Ng, Dual-Degree Master’s Student, SSW and School of Public Health

Many urban school districts are under-resourced to meet the mental health needs of their students and therefore rely on emergency service providers for crisis response. These emergency response services, however, can increase the likelihood that youth will be served in emergency departments and, in the case of police response, increase the likelihood of criminal justice involvement. Optimally, youth experiencing a mental health crisis would instead receive ongoing outpatient mental health treatment.

This project builds on work of the Boston Youth Mental Health Crisis Response Coalition, that was established in 2019 with the goal of designing and conducting multidisciplinary research to improve emergency mental health response for youth in Boston. Members of the Coalition currently include researchers at Boston Medical Center (working with the Boston Emergency Services Team; BEST), researchers in the Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, School of Social Work, and Medical School at BU, researchers from the Criminology and Justice Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and partners from the Boston Police Department, BEST, and Boston Public Schools (BPS). A top priority of the coalition is to better understand emergency mental health response in schools.

This current project will advance the work of this Coalition by generating a compendium of resources that could be used by BPS and community stakeholders (including staff and family members) to respond to youth during mental health crises. This compendium of resources will be developed with the aim of re-directing youth to organizations in Boston that can effectively meet their ongoing behavioral health needs and, specifically, replace the need to call on emergency services providers. To develop this resource, Green, Augsberger, Borba, & Carroll will engage in a process of community resource mapping, which is an asset-focused approach that engages community stakeholders in identifying existing resources of value that can be used to promote local solutions to community-identified problems. Ultimately, our aim is to provide a resource that can be used by members of the Boston Public School community, as an alternative to relying on emergency service providers, and to reduce racial inequities in mental health service access.

Publications

Green, J. G (2021). Boston Area Behavioral Health Resource Guide for Boston Public Schools.

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