ACT treatment for youth : a contextual behavioral approach

Abstrakt

I sin forskning har Fredrik Livheim undersökt terapiformen ACT (acceptance commitment therapy) under verkliga förhållanden bland skolelever i grupp. Resultaten visar att ACT är en effektivt behandling för att minska spänningar, symptom på depression och eventuellt ångest. 

ACT treatment for youth : a contextual behavioral approach

Mental and substance abuse disorders in children and youth are the leading cause of disability in the world. According to the World Health Organization (2018), approximately 20% of the world’s children and adolescents suffer from mental health disorders or problems. Mental health problems among youth have increased between 1950 and 2016, and Sweden stands out, with a marked increase in internalizing mental health symptoms, even when compared to other Scandinavian countries. Increases are as sharp for both boys and girls, but girls report more problems. The most common problems include symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress, and they often come together. To address those problems, we need to intervene on a societal level as well as helping youth directly. We can and should help at different levels and stages of these problems; helping youth at early stages can spare them a lot of suffering. To scale up the availability of treatments, we need to transfer some treatment delivery from highly specialized staff to less-specialized staff. We also need to understand what causes mental health problems and how effective treatments work. To this end, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is promising, along with the construct of psychological flexibility (PF). There is initial support for using ACT for youth mental health problems; however, more research is needed.

Aims: The overall aim of this thesis was to test and develop transdiagnostic group treatments for different youth populations. We wanted to test the interventions under real-world conditions when delivered by less-specialized staff. And to begin understanding possible mechanisms of change, we did the first replication on youth of the psychometric properties of the instrument Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth (AFQ-Y) for detecting the PF construct. We also wanted to explore whether PF mediated the outcomes in one of the studies.