Leveraging technology to advance behavioral health equity in juvenile justice.
Presented by: Marina Toulu-Shams, PhD, Professor, Dept of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Weill Institute of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Dept of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Marina Tolou-Shams, trained as a pediatric and forensic psychologist, is a clinician-scientist. She leads the UCSF Juvenile Justice Behavioral Health lab whose mission is to improve behavioral health outcomes for youth who come into contact with the juvenile justice, child welfare, and foster care systems (https://jjbh.org/). Her NIH-funded research focuses on improving youths’ physical, mental, and emotional health, reducing drug and alcohol use, reducing HIV/STI risk behaviors, and increasing access to evidence-based care with particular emphasis on leveraging technology to achieve these outcomes. One study is a pilot trial of SMS text-messaging platform to engage court-involved youth in substance use or dual diagnosis treatment services. A second developmental study takes a mixed-methods, multi-informant participatory research approach to developing and testing a Foster Care Family Navigator model to improve youth mental health outcomes.
The objectives of the presentation are to:
- understand the substance use and mental health intervention needs of justice-involved youth;
- identify barriers to behavioral health care access and engagement; and,
- discuss ways that technology may hold promise for improving justice-involved youth’s behavioral health and legal outcomes.