Conversations with Dr. Tony featuring Dr. Michelle Munson
When: Wednesday, May 11 - 12:00 PM
Duration: 1 hours
Location: Zoom
Event Details:
Systematic forces and social relationships strongly impact how young individuals make decisions about seeking mental health services. As providers, it is essential to encourage young people and their families to seek mental health care services when it is necessary and to positively facilitate the quality of those services.
In this “Conversations with Dr. Tony", speak with Dr. Michelle Munson about defining, understanding, and supporting the health identity development of transition age youth. We hear about intervention programs that draw on empirically-based communication strategies to capture young people's attention and engage them in their care. Dr. Munson discusses factors that influence utilization and investment in mental health services, the ways in which intervention programs positively impact service use and life outcomes, and how relationships or lack of relationships influence those processes.
Dr. Michelle Munson is a Professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. She has professional interests in mental health services research and intervention development and testing, and her work centers on adolescents and young adults. Dr. Munson's intervention programs use innovative and empirically-based communication strategies to capture young people’s attention and engage them in their care, including a dual provider team of a social worker and a peer. The programs also rely on modalities that youth favor to facilitate mental health conversations, such as creative arts and the use of narratives (or stories) surrounding mental health topics. Dr. Munson’s research centers the perspectives of youth, their families of choice, and their providers in order to develop services and intervention strategies that match the views of those who use them.
Dr. Munson’s most recent research seeks to understand questions of access and utilization of professional mental health care relative to “alternative options” young adults use to manage their mental health symptoms. The team is empirically testing mental health decision-making around managing mental health symptoms, while working with community advisors to design outreach strategies that will be acceptable within the community to identify young people in need and assist them in accessing preferred approaches to manage their health as needed.
