Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: PHSI

The profound level of mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidalty among street-involved youth has been well-documented. Yet, literature which describes and evaluates interventions to address the mental health problems of street youth is virtually non-existent. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is an empirically supported intervention designed to treat a range of serious mental health problems, such as those experienced by street-involved youth. Our objective is to bring together a national group of researchers and decision makers who are committed to preparing a grant application for the April or October 2009 CIHR-PHSI competition directed toward mental health and homelessness in youth (MHCC). The proposed submission to PHSI is to evaluate the effectiveness of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) to enhance emotion-based coping skills, increase interpersonal effectiveness and strengthen resilience amongst street-involved youth. This novel intervention has the potential to strengthen and build upon the existing strengths of transitional housing programmes for these youth. The proposed three day planning meeting will enable our partnership group to achieve overall consensus regarding: research questions & hypotheses; outcome variables of interest; and research design. In addition, our partnership group will determine how best to administer the DBT intervention to our population. Creating a successful partnership with researchers, decision makers, policy makers and users of research is essential to develop a well designed research study which simultaneously integrates effective knowledge exchange. If the intervention is shown to be effective, a productive partnership will be central to facilitating up-take of this evidence-based intervention to service providers across a range of community settings within Canada. The MHCC has indicated support for this submission.