Parents Served by Assertive Community Treatment: A Needs Based Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) represents an effective treatment for individuals with severe mental illness. Though studies estimate that as many as half of all people with severe mental illness are parents, little is known about consumers receiving ACT services who are parents. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to 1) estimate the prevalence of parent ACT consumers, 2) identify current ACT team policies and practices for treating parent consumers, and 3) examine the perspective of parent consumers served by ACT teams. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed via two separate studies. In study 1, eighty-two ACT providers from 76 teams across the United States and Canada were surveyed to determine the prevalence of parent ACT consumers, ACT team policies for identifying the parental status of consumers, treatment services available for parent consumers, and provider attitudes about parent consumers. Providers estimated roughly 21.6% of ACT consumers were parents. Less than half of providers (46.3%) reported formally asking about parental status during intake and only 20.7% providers belonged to ACT teams that provide special programs/services designed for parent consumers. The majority of providers (75.6%) reported negative or mixed attitudes about parents with severe mental illness. In study 2, seventeen parents with severe mental illness being served by ACT teams were interviewed about parenting, the relationship between parenting and severe mental illness, parenting needs, and suggestions for improved treatment services for parents. All parents were able to identify at least one positive aspect of parenting and most parents (76.5%) also identified negative aspects of parenting. Loss of custody emerged as a significant parenting problem, with the majority of parents (88.2%) experiencing loss of custody at least once. Given the difficulties of being a parent and having to manage a severe mental illness, parents expressed interest in several parent-focused treatment services, including family therapy, parenting skills, communication skills training, resources/finances for children, and social support groups with peers. When asked about overall satisfaction with ACT services, most participants with adult children (87.5%) reported having no unmet parent-related needs and high satisfaction (4.63 out of 5) with ACT services, whereas parents with young children (77.8%) reported having numerous unmet parenting needs and low satisfaction (3.78 out of 5) with ACT services. Thus, the age of participants’ children was a significant factor, indicating that the ACT treatment model may not be adequately serving parents of young, dependent children. Overall, findings suggest the need for more attention and focus on parent consumers, including formal identification of consumers’ parental status and improved parent-related treatment services and support
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".