Highlights from the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Written by Dr. Matt Biel
Director of Thrive Center for Children, Families, and Communities
Earlier this month, I attended the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Seattle with some of Thrive Center’s amazing faculty, who were also there to present on their work. The energy and enthusiasm at the conference was wonderful. I was heartened by the passion, commitment, and excitement shared by clinicians and researchers in the field, which seems stronger than at any time in my career.
The Academy’s president, Dr. Tami Benton , led with an initiative that she calls “Bringing the Village to the Children,” a nod to an adage with which many of us are familiar: “It takes a village to raise a child…” In her speech, which you can read online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry , Dr. Benton recalled how the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced how much we rely on our communities — and others — to ensure mental health for children.
“Without schools, families, foster families for youth in child welfare systems, and a continuum of resources and providers for mental health care, we were unable to provide needed care. We learned that we must be partners with the systems caring for children in order for them to benefit from our treatments. We learned that we cannot stand outside of these systems,” Dr. Benton said. “We must lean in, collaborate, and lead. We must become integral to the villages in which our children are growing.”
Dr. Benton’s initiative focuses on undoing the tremendous siloing of therapeutic, educational, and supportive interventions that are intended to support children and their families — but that often result instead in overwhelming, confusing, and under-serving the people they are designed to help. Dr. Benton laid out a vision of child mental health services as a unifying force that can provide strengths-based, cross-systems, multi-disciplinary care that enhances the long-term thriving of children and adolescents with mental health needs.
This vision is deeply consistent with our values and work at the Thrive Center, and can be extended to also include individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The life course focus of our work at Thrive, and our commitment to partnering deeply with communities, further illuminates how this sort of systems transformation can occur. When we contribute to the design and implementation of family-centric, strengths-based, community-led systems of care, we are part of a “re-villaging” effort that has the potential to sustainably improve mental and health well-being on a local level.