Prof. Bruce F. Chorpita, Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA will provide an overview of historical models for addressing mental health challenges in clinical science, articulating how they evolved, and outlining some of the current limitations and opportunities. Aspiring to emphasize the relevance to knowledge engineers, he will outline a generalized framework for thinking about mental health problems and their solutions, describing the field's current approaches for specifying (or not specifying) many of the relevant concepts for improving lives and strengthening communities. Specific examples from his 25-year collaboration with Eric Daleiden in building systems for structured collaboration in children's mental health systems will be used to illustrate some working alternatives/complements to the dominant paradigm in mental health research and service, showcasing empirical support for their effectiveness to those more traditional approaches. The talk will conclude with a detailed illustration of a model for conceptualizing and labeling activities, resources, problems, and solutions in the mental health field, which should illustrate windows of opportunity for improving knowledge management in clinical care.
Bruce F. Chorpita, Ph.D. (he/him) is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York and held a faculty position with the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaii from 1997 to 2008. From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Chorpita served as the Clinical Director of the Hawaii Department of Health’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division, where along with Eric Daleiden, his team doubled the effect size and cost effectiveness of mental health outcomes for all youth served by the state system. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, many of which focus on strategies for improving efficiency and quality in children’s mental health systems, and he is the lead author of the MATCH-ADTC protocol, an evidence-based treatment that outperformed multiple other evidence-based treatments in two randomized effectiveness trials in three different states. His ongoing research is aimed at improving the effectiveness of mental health service systems for children through innovation in mental health treatment design, clinical decision-making, information-delivery models, and service system architecture, focused in low-income and diverse communities within the US and around the world. He has been awarded more than $25M in research funding, from the National Institute of Mental Health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the William T. Grant Foundation, as well as multiple state and county mental health systems. Dr. Chorpita is Past President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and recently completed his service as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee Accelerating Behavioral Science Through Ontology Development and Use. He is committed to the mission of strengthening communities and improving lives by creating better structures for human collaboration and by enhancing the use of evidence from behavioral science to guide decisions and actions.