Quick access to mental health resources for St. Joseph County youth is expanding through a partnership between the University of Notre Dame and Northwestern.
The new three-year program, called the St. Joseph County Universal Wellness Project, aims to help bridge the gap in local mental health care for young people through in-person or digital single-session interventions.
The program will train 75 local providers to offer a one-time, solution-focused meeting with youth in need of mental health support. It will also offer local youth access to an online platform that provides a self-directed experience, using videos, tips and suggestions on available resources to help create a plan for improving their mental health.
“We are taking evidence-based methods developed through rigorous research and creating a way to scale them, so they reach the people who need them most,” said Kristin Valentino, Notre Dame professor of psychology and director of the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, in a press release. “In addition to giving local youth free and anonymous mental health support tools, we believe this project will strengthen our community and serve as a national model for scaling county-level interventions.”
The Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will lead the program locally.
Developed by Jessica Schleider, Northwestern associate professor of medical social sciences, and her team, the digital and provider-delivered single-session intervention programs have shown through clinical trials to reduce youth depression and anxiety symptoms for up to 12 months and increase motivation to seek further care.
“This is a dream project for me, and precisely the sort of work I’m in this field to push forward,” Schleider said. “Single-session interventions, because of how scalable they are, really fill these untouched gaps in the mental health care system that high-intensity treatments like weekly psychotherapy delivered by professionals were never built to address.”
The Veldman Clinic, opening this spring in South Bend, will enhance the research of faculty in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology and offer training for clinical psychology graduate students.
“The St. Joseph County Universal Wellness Project is an incredible opportunity for the Veldman Clinic to implement evidence-based interventions and build strong community partnerships as it opens its doors,” Kenneth Scheve, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters, said.
