Community Study of Outcome Monitoring for Emotional Disorders in Teens

The UP-A is an emotion-focused, transdiagnostic approach for adolescents (ages 12-18) with a primary emotional disorder. It is a developmental adaptation of the Unified Protocol, a transdiagnostic treatment for adults with emotional disorders. Clinicians present all skills in the context of the emotions most salient to presenting concerns and adolescent/caregiver conceptualizations of treatment needs, thereby personalizing treatment. The UP-A is delivered in 8-21 weekly sessions, with clinician flexibility regarding the sequencing and depth with which various sections are presented to clients and caregivers, as well as the emotions targeted during the course of the intervention.

"The YOQ consists of parent- and youth-report measures of symptoms and alliance administered weekly on a tablet computer. The YOQ online system then generates reports to provide clinicians with systematic feedback about client progress, flagging critical items that have been endorsed (e.g., suicidality, hallucinations), presenting graphs of ratings over time, and providing empirically-derived alerts when clients are failing to progress or showing deterioration. Clinicians will be trained to use this feedback to modify treatment as needed, share it with families as appropriate, and use it to enhance use of supervision."

Clinicians assigned to the TAU condition will be instructed to use whatever treatment methods and outcome monitoring strategies they typically use with adolescents with internalizing disorders.