Systematic Treatment Selection (STS)
National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism
Palo Alto Medical Reserve Corps (Disaster Mental Health)
Disaster Management Research
Systematic Treatment Selection
www.innerlife.com
The STS is one of three general approaches that have sought to identify the scientific foundations of mental health treatments and to establishing treatment applications upon a scientific framework. The most usual method of identifying what treatments have been demonstrated to be effective, scientifically, entails comparing specific treatment models to a no-treatment or placebo control condition, among a diagnostically homogeneous group of patients. This approach relies on a random clinical trial methodology and seeks establish efficacy rather than effectiveness (e.g., impact of an ideal treatment in a non-representative setting). This approach, by its nature, gives scant attention to factors that are not directly related to the treatment model but that, in the mental health arena, are critically important contributors to establishing the effectiveness of treatments in actual practice. Namely, this approach ignores the important role played by characteristics of the therapeutic relationships and of the particular participants who are involved in the treatment (i.e., patients, therapists, family members). Because of these omissions, some scholars have urged the use of alternative procedures for assessing the scientific validity of an intervention in mental health. One of these alternative methods identifies the role of various patient characteristics and participant qualities, resulting in a list of qualities that can be assigned or varied in treatment in order to enhance the effectiveness of interventions (Norcross, 2002). Unlike the first method, which addresses the question of efficacy, effectiveness research such as embodied in the second approach, considers the range of actual factors and settings in which treatment is actually practiced.
All three of these approaches assume that scientific research is the most useful and valid foundation on which to establish the efficacy and effectiveness of an intervention. Thereby, they serve to complement one another, rather than being competitive systems. They do, however, stand in contrast to the many approaches that eschew scientific evidence in favor of personal experience and strong beliefs. Specifically, these general, research-informed systems view sound scientific research as absolutely critical to establishing a credible treatment and to preventing fraud and misuse of treatment procedures. Indeed, the STS system provides a broad framework that allows integration and balance among the systems’ relative emphasis on ideal treatments and the practical significance of participant, contextual, and relationship domains that are addressed in effectiveness research. (more…)
National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism
www.terrorismpsychology.org
The National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism (NCPT) was founded in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks to research psychological aspects of terrorism, mass trauma, and to develop effective mass-casualty response strategies drawn from the behavioral sciences.
The NCPT served as a research test-bed for the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism (CIPERT), which has since taken the lead in counter-terror research.
The NCPT continues to focus on conducting high quality, transdisciplinary research in the following areas:
- Disaster mental health for mass casualty incidents
- Evaluation of large-scale disaster management performance
- Development and assessment of simulation training systems for emergency managers.
The center is also centrally involved in training the next generation of clinical psychologists who will be equipped to treat victims of terrorism and mass disaster.
In 2003 the NCPT was recognized by the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs as one of the country’s most innovative sites for graduate student training in psychology.
The center has been variously funded by the US Navy, the US Surgeon General, the National Science Foundation, and has received support for graduate education through the Department of Homeland Security. The NCPT research group is led by Dr. Larry E. Beutler, PhD, ABPP.