Addressing the barriers to mental health services for inner city children and their caretakers

This paper will outline a series of three research studies meant to identify factors related to child mental health service usage and barriers to help seeking for urban minority children and their caretakers. In addition, this paper will describe the systematic development and evaluation of a telephone intervention strategy aimed towards increasing overall attendance at initial intake appointments at an urban child serving agency. The first study explores differences in demographic variables, for two groups of children (n=450), those that came to an initial intake interview and those that requested child mental health services, but failed to come to any scheduled appointments. The second study evaluates a telephone engagement intervention meant to increase initial attendance (n=54). Finally, the third study, more rigorously evaluates the impact of an intensive telephone intervention on initial attendance rates by randomly assigning families to the more focused telephone intervention or a 'business as usual' telephone screening (n=108).