Provided by David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
Surgeon General of the United States of America
Chapter 3: Children and Mental Health
Services Interventions
Treatment Interventions
This section examines the effectiveness of such treatment interventions as
outpatient, partial hospitalization/day, residential, inpatient treatments, and
medication. Much of the research on their effectiveness deals with children’s
outcomes largely independent of diagnosis. As noted earlier in this chapter (see
Treatment Strategies), practitioners and researchers previously shied away from
diagnosis because of the inherent difficulty of making a diagnosis, concerns
about labeling children, and the limited usefulness of DSM classifications for
children. Each intervention was developed to treat a host of mental health
conditions in children and adolescents. Each also was delivered in a wide range
of settings. Over time, the combination of interventions and settings, with the
exception of medication, became conceptualized as “treatments,” which stimulated
research on their effectiveness (Goldman, 1998). They are not, however,
treatments in the conventional sense of the term because they are less specific
than other treatments with respect to indications, intensity (i.e., “dose”), and
elements of the intervention. There is little research describing treatment in
actual clinical settings.
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