Grant: Project Grant

Mental health is central to the wellbeing of autistic children and their families. Ensuring the fit between the support and the characteristics of each autistic child and their families is crucial. However, evidence-based mental health interventions in autistic children are often "one-size-fits-all" and of high cost and with low accessibility. Virtual mental health (e-MH) support has great potential to improve access and meet individual needs in a flexible way. Experiences of Canadian autistic children and families during the COVID-19 pandemic provide invaluable information of the current use of e-MH in Canada. By learning from these experiences, we will clarify what is available, what it still missing, and how to improve access and usefulness of e-MH support for school-age autistic children and their families. We will then create an e-MH framework which can flexibly integrate ingredients of existing evidence-based interventions to develop a "modular" e-MH program - a collection of strategies addressing different mental health needs, to be selected for use to meet individual needs. We will first perform a pan-Canadian survey and in-depth interviews. These experiences and data will be synthesized and used to develop an e-MH framework and a modular e-MH program that can be personalized, which will then be piloted and evaluated. We will use the Formative Method for Adapting Psychotherapy, an approach to therapy adaptation that provides guidance for incorporating empirical, clinical, and field knowledge, to inform the development processes. This project will provide important knowledge to create a flexible e-MH framework for Canadian school-age autistic children and their families. This framework could be applied widely to enhance e-MH support that can be personalized for autistic children of various characteristics, across geographical regions and contexts.