Will Multisystemic Therapy work across the pond? 

When I was first introduced to MST about two years ago, I approached it with a healthy dose of caution. Among my questions were will what works in the U.S. translate to the U.K.? Do the positive outcomes reflect actual impact or clever evaluation? Does this service cherry-pick and therefore is guaranteed to get good outcomes? And as a licensed provider, will we be micro-managed by MST-UK? The program sounded very prescriptive, and I had the sense that it was “painting by numbers.”

My organization, Action for Children, is driven to ensure that all our services have a positive impact on children, young people, and their families. In addition, we have a growing interest in specific programs that are underpinned by a strong evidence base. Naturally, one of our primary charitable objectives is that our fundraised and contracted incomes are spent efficiently and effectively. 

Troubled Youth Goes From Hating to Loving School

(For the sake of confidentiality, the client is called “Joe” in the story.) 

Many times, the behaviors and circumstances surrounding cases referred to Multisystemic Therapy (MST) seem insurmountable. In Joe’s case, years of school refusal (since kindergarten), academic struggles and defiance made it seem as though finding the solution was akin to the proverbial needle in a haystack. However, the family, referral source and school had pinned their hopes on MST since it is designed to work with such intensive behavior. Despite the challenging task ahead of Catherine Cook, the MST therapist, she helped the family retrieve the missing needle that positively contributed to the family’s success of getting a 16-year-old boy back to a school and what’s more, a school where he has thrived academically and enjoyed attending.

Georgia Has Over 50% Decline in Juvenile Out of Home Placement

The state of Georgia saw impressive declines in out-of-home placements of juvenile offenders during the first nine months of a statewide initiative that implemented evidence-based practices led by Gov. Nathan Deal. According to the “Report of the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform 2015” released early this year, “Among the counties participating . . . felony commitments and placements . . . dropped more than 62% statewide over a nine-month period ending in October 2014, dramatically exceeding the 15% goal set when the grants were awarded.”

Tell us your story

We Are Running Another Contest.

Celebrate the achievements of your agency, therapists, and families. Send in their stories. Win a $100 Travel Visa Money Card (which works internationally). Get read on the MST blog, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t win, you get an MST T-shirt.

Send your entries by June 30 to Lori.Cohen@mstservices.com. Make sure to put, success story contest in the subject line. 

Let your teams and colleagues know about the contest. Recognition is a good thing.  

In her own works, A mom from the U.K. tells how MST turned a dark, negative place into “happy house.”

Listen to the mom in her own words below, or read the transcript.

We heard about MST through other people, but my son was too young, and it wasn’t possible. And then when he was old enough, we didn’t know whether we would get funding for it, but we did. We would have done anything at that point to try and make things right.

The cost of not using evidence-based programs for troubled youths is high

Proponents of Multisystemic Therapy (MST) and other evidence-based programs say it over and over. Give young people experiencing difficulties the right intervention and you save society enormous amounts of money by keeping them home, out of jail, and turning them into productive citizens.

Fifty British charities have weighed in on the subject. They estimate that a failure to intervene early leads to crises more costly to fix later. More costly? How about $2 billion more costly.

A mom was ready to place her child. Nothing was working until she found MST.

Jackie was referred to MST in December 2014. I called her mother’s cell four or five times without any contact. I drove to their home one day. Jackie and her mother lived in rural Southwest Pennsylvania. No one was home. I left a note.

Psychologist finds great alternative for youth with Multisystemic Therapy

As a young clinical psychologist, fresh out of graduate school working for a private community mental-health agency, I was referred to a 16-year-old white male for an “evaluation and assessment.”  The evaluation and assessment is common task in the child-serving system. Though it has different names, different funding streams and can be performed at a myriad of points in the process, it is always done for the same basic reason: to receive an expert’s opinion on what next steps should be taken in a child’s care. For the young man before me, it wasn’t quite clear what that step should be.

Multisystemic Therapy helps shut down safe-houses in the UK 

In an Inner London borough on a hot summer’s day, unusual for the U.K. (remember, we are obsessed with the weather this side of the pond), the MST team was supporting a family in search of their 13-year-old daughter, who was out past curfew, putting herself at risk. This was time for us to help this family learn to increase monitoring and supervision as well as help their daughter get involved in pro-social activities.

Our MST therapists have learned over time that we must show families how to do higher-level interventions needed to extract their teens from criminal peers. These interventions sometimes include locating and poisoning “safe houses” and posting pictures of the young person in the community to alert others that this teen is vulnerable and the family needs their support. (“Safe houses” are homes or places where a teen thinks she or he can go and are “safe” because parents and other adults don’t know where they are, and even if they did, the adults wouldn’t dare go looking for them there.) These MST interventions are performed with care to ensure the safety of this high-risk population. Here are two of our favorite success stories, demonstrating this is always done with hope, humor, and sticking to the MST Analytic Process and Principles.

Finding the Right FIT for Mum and Son With Multisystemic Therapy

MST clinicians often get asked how we affect change in families who are mandated to services or families who have not had success in other services. The answer is pretty straightforward, in MST, we maintain a constant focus on engagement and alignment, we meet people where they are and leverage their strengths for change.

This case began deceptively well. The family had bought into meeting with the therapist and changing the son’s behavior. Then a barrier was hit. The mother wasn’t buying MST’s focus on working with and treating the entire family.