We all hope—and probably expect—that clinicians use only mental health therapies that are scientifically proven to improve symptoms. A new study from Penn Medicine and Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) shows that, unfortunately, evidence-based therapies to treat youth with mental health problems are slow to catch on. Specifically, researchers found that over a five-year period in Philadelphia, use of evidence-based therapies—practices backed by scientific data showing that symptoms improve in response to treatment, such as cognitive behavioral therapy—increased only modestly, despite the city and researchers’ substantial efforts to showcase the value of these approaches and to provide training to community clinicians. The results were published in Implementation Science.
This finding is of critical importance because clinicians who use evidence-based practices as part of their routine care obtain much better outcomes for children with depression, anxiety, trauma, and disruptive behavior disorders compared with clinicians who do not.
“Evidenced-based therapies are effective for treating a wide range of psychiatric conditions, but there is still a gap in widespread use,” says the study’s lead author Rinad S. Beidas, an associate professor of psychiatry and medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, and founding director of the Penn Implementation Science Center at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “While findings showed a modest increase in use, the data point to a clear need for finding better ways to support clinicians and organizations in using EBP therapies. This research-to-practice gap is a historically intractable problem, which exists not only in behavioral health but all across health care specialties.”
Read more at Penn Medicine News.
