John Weisz
Harvard University, MA·Psychology
Children and teens who come to outpatient mental health clinics rarely have just one problem. Many struggle at the same time with depression, anxiety, trauma or behavior problems, and the issue that matters most can change during treatment.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
youth psychotherapy
child and adolescent mental health
transdiagnostic treatment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Test in a randomized effectiveness trial whether FIRST, a five-principle treatment that works across disorders, improves mental health more than usual care for youths aged 8–15 in four community clinics.
- Measure change in the problems each youth and caregiver named as most important at the start, along with standardized depression, anxiety, trauma and conduct measures, in FIRST versus usual care.
- Test whether FIRST improves regulation of negative emotions, and whether that improvement explains FIRST's outcomes relative to usual care.
- Examine whether clinicians' baseline knowledge of, attitudes toward and motivation to use evidence-based practices predict or moderate how well they put those practices into psychotherapy.
More about the research
Most treatment manuals target a single disorder. That makes them hard for busy community therapists to learn and hard to fit to young people whose needs keep shifting. A flexible approach that works across many problems could make good care easier to deliver.
Why it matters
Young people in community mental health care often have overlapping depression, anxiety, trauma and conduct problems. A single, principle-based treatment that community clinicians can learn cheaply could improve care for these families. Results on emotion regulation and on therapist traits could also show clinics what makes evidence-based practices take hold in everyday settings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amanda Jensen-Doss
University of Miami, FL·Psychology
Define and evaluate the full range of measurement-based care (MBC) fidelity domains using digital system usage data, self-report, and observer ratings from the COMET trial in community clinics.
Shannon E Sauer-Zavala
University of Kentucky, KY·Psychology
Test whether brief therapy modules each change their intended personality dimension (neuroticism, agreeableness or conscientiousness), using single-case experiments with baseline, 6-session treatment and follow-up phases.
Anna Lau
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Psychology
Test whether a tailored mindfulness program reduces emotion suppression, experiential avoidance and unmodulated perseverance among high-achieving, low-income Black, Latinx and Asian American students, compared with a study-skills control, in a 504-student randomized trial.
The school
Harvard University: 42 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 712 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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