features
spring 2024
By Andrea Grant
Illustration by Vivian Mineker
If you needed a pair of shoes, would you stop at the nearest store, pick up the very first pair you saw, and buy them without trying them on? Of course not. Sure, the shoes might cover your feet, but they might not meet your specific needs or be the right fit. Yet that’s how much agency many parents and other caregivers—sometimes desperate for urgent help and
unsure how to navigate a complex and overburdened healthcare system—feel they have
when choosing a mental health provider for their child.
“I realized early on in my clinical training that what type of treatment a family receives can often be determined by things that shouldn’t have so much impact. For example, a family’s schedule. If they’re available on Thursdays and Thursday is the family therapy clinic, then that’s where they’re likely to be placed—whether it’s the most appropriate fit or not,” says Psychology Professor David Langer, program director of Suffolk’s clinical psychology doctoral program.
That’s a problem, according to Langer, because therapists and therapeutic approaches are not interchangeable and finding the right match matters for effective treatment. A therapist who provides consistent warmth and support might be a good fit for some, while others benefit most from treatment aimed at teaching youth and families specific skills to change behaviors.
Logistics matter, too. Should they hold individual or family sessions? Should they meet short-term for acute issues or over a longer period for more complex needs? Actively participating in those decisions can help patients and families feel valued and invested and, ideally, lead to better treatment plans for each family.
For the last decade, Langer’s research has focused on how best to bring caregivers and youth into the treatment planning process in order to improve outcomes. Langer says that means asking questions like, “How do we exchange information, discuss values and priorities, and have patients share their own area of expertise, such as the family’s lived experience, background, culture, identities?”
A common misconception about asking youth and families how they want their treatment plan to look is that it will lead to disagreements—or that kids and teens are incapable of making decisions regarding their own therapy.
However, Langer’s work has shown that this more collaborative approach to therapy can be markedly more effective.
In 2014, he received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the effectiveness of personalizing youth psychotherapy. He found that families who participated in a shared decision-making treatment plan reported lower conflict and regret in their treatment decisions compared to families in the control treatment plan, according to a study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
Remarkably, Langer says even those in the study’s control group—who did not participate in shared treatment planning but simply had their treatment plan explained—still reported feeling more involved in the process. “In all their previous experiences with mental healthcare, no one had even told them what the plan was, so that alone was an improvement.”
Langer, who also serves as president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, encourages anyone seeking mental healthcare for themselves or their families to feel empowered to ask their therapists important questions. Get to know what informs their work, what approaches they’re skilled at and prefer, and how you’ll be involved in the treatment plan. Know that your voices matter most of all because, as Langer points out, “you and your child are the experts on you and your child.
“Any therapist I would want to go to would welcome a conversation like that.”
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—Professor David Langer
Know that your voices matter most of all because “you and your child are the experts on you and your child.”
Suffolk University Psychology Professor David Langer
