Acute, Intensive, & Residential Services SIG Update

Acute, Intensive, & Residential Services SIG Update

By Alysha Thompson, PhD
AIRS Special Interest Group Chair

Inaugural AIRS SIG Awards 

The Acute, Intensive, & Residential Services (AIRS) SIG Board of Directors is proud to announce that Jarrod Leffler, PhD, ABPP has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 AIRS Distinguished Professional Contributions Award. This award recognizes Dr. Leffler’s significant efforts to promote awareness, accessibility, and implementation of evidence-based mental health services within the area of acute, intensive, and/or residential services with youth. Dr. Leffler is licensed across three states (Virginia, Minnesota, and Ohio) and is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Leffler has been a champion and pioneer in the AIRS arena throughout his career, and is also a founder of the AIRS SIG and has lead the executive board.

The AIRS SIG Board of Directors is also proud to announce that Ms. Patricia Garibaldi, MS, from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 AIRS Distinguished Student Contributions Award. This award is based on Ms. Garibaldi’s significant efforts in practice, research, and advocacy within the field of child and adolescent psychology, with a special focus on high-acuity populations and care. She demonstrates exemplar performance in both clinical practice and research contributions with children and adolescents in various settings of higher clinical acuity.

As the AIRS SIG award winners, Dr. Leffler and Ms. Garibaldi will be recognized at this summer’s APA conference during the AIRS SIG Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Leffler and Ms. Garibaldi! 

Connect with the AIRS-SIG at APA 

We have lots of folks who will be presenting or attending APA in Seattle this year! See below for AIRS SIG relevant presentations at APA, we are looking forward to seeing you and hearing from the great presenters below! I am looking forward to seeing you all in Seattle!

Thursday, August 8th

1:00 – 1:50pm – “Developing and Implementing an Integrative Therapeutic Program for Acute Pediatric Psychiatry Units,” Lisa Roberts and Jennifer Moran

1:00 – 1:50pm – “Psychiatric Residential Care for Youth: Commonly utilized, rarely explored in research,” Linda Ruan-Iu, Guy Diamond, Jordan Soper, Alannah Rivers, Guy Weissinger, Michael Roeske, Nicole Watkins

Friday, August 9th

10:00 – 10:50am – Division 53 Poster Session, Spotlight on a poster
“Breaking the Silence: Addressing Child Suicidal Behaviors in Psychiatric Inpatient Units” by Alyssa Allen, Ashley Brooks, and Michelle Schultz

2:00 – 2:50pm – SCCAP Distinguished Career Award, Jarrod Leffler, co-founder and past chair of the AIRS SIG will be receiving the Distinguished Career Award and presenting his work, “Recreating the Wheel, Groundhog Day, Deja Vue All Over Again…  Call it What You Like, but Let’s Develop a Better Way to Do This.”

2:00 – 2:50pm – “Understanding the Youth Mental Health Crisis: Bringing Theory to Public Health,” Carl Waitz

3:00 – 3:50pm – Division 53 / SCCAP Business Meeting

4:00 – 4:50pm – Division 53 / SCCAP 25^th Anniversary Presidential Panel

5:00 – 5:50pm – SCCAP (Division 53) Social Hour

Saturday, August 10th

8:00 – 8:50am – “Health Equity for Youth in Inpatient Psychiatric Services for Children and Adolescents,” Carl Waitz, Aaron Vaughn, Jarrod Leffler, Alysha Thompson

8:00 – 8:50am – “The Intersection of Trauma, Gender, and Race Status among Treatment Seeking Youth,” Hilary Hodgdon, Lia Martin, Sujata Swaroop, Skyler McComas, Elijah Oyenuga, Kayla Lord

10:00 – 10:50am – AIRS SIG Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony in the SCCAP Suite – stay tuned for more details from SCCAP about the location of the suite! In the past few years we have used this as a social hour to connect with folks in the AIRS SIG in person, network, and talk through topics specific to the AIRS SIG. This year, we will also have the inaugural presentation of our AIRS SIG awards!

Recent Conference Presentations:

At AACAP in New York in October, Alisson Tebbett-Mock and Ema Saito presented their poster “The Effects of Pandemic on Aggressive Behavior in Acute Care Adolescent Psychiatric Unit”.

At the Anxiety and Depression Association of America conference in April, Nathaniel Van Kirk, PhD, Rachel Schein, PsyD, and Jarrod Leffler, PhD, ABPP, and Maria Fraire, PhD (pictured below) presented on building competence in Acute / Intensive Care Training programs.

At the International Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professionals (IACAPAP) conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in May, Jasmine Ghannadpour and team presented a symposium on eating disorders, including work from their inpatient unit and partial hospital program 

Recent and Upcoming Publications by AIRS SIG Members 

Hodgson, C., Krishna, R., & Akasaka, K. (in press, 2024). Milieu Management and Therapeutic Groups in Inpatient Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Units. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America.

Leffler, J.M., Thompson, A.D., & Simmons, S. (editors; in press). Handbook of Evidence-Based Inpatient Mental Health Programs for Children and Adolescents. Springer Publishing Company, LLC, New York, NY. **Almost every chapter in this handbook has a member of the AIRS SIG as a co-author, with over 15 institutions around the country represented** 

Rubenson, M. P., Gurtovenko, K., Simmons, S. W., & Thompson, A. D. (2024). Systematic Review: Patient Outcomes in Transdiagnostic Adolescent Partial Hospitalization Programs. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 63(2), 136–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2023.03.022

Tebbett-Mock, A., Saito, E., Tang, S., McGee, M., Van Meter, A. (in press, April 2024). The Mental Health Toll of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Adolescents Receiving Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmocology.

Waitz, C., & Bekkeli, K. (2024). Psychoanalytically informed care and behavioral medicine: Consideration and recommendations for evidence-based practice in institutions. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 41(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000489

Waitz, C., Caracansi, A., Kaufman, K., Campbell, E., Anglemyer, E., Anglero-Diaz, Y., Paden, S., Zou, B., & Ibeziako, P. (2024). Implementing patient-reported outcome measures on an adolescent inpatient psychiatry unit: A feasibility study. Psychological Services. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/38483486

Ongoing AIRS SIG Events

Our early career consultation group continues to meet monthly. If you identify as an early career psychologist working in AIRS settings, please come and join our group for community and consultation! More information regarding dates can be found in our attached flier.