Children's mental health in a continuum of care: clinical outcomes at 18 months for the Fort Bragg demonstration.

Abstract

This article uses data collected at 18 months from the evaluation of the continuum of mental health services of the Fort Bragg Child and Adolescent Mental Health Demonstration Project (the Demonstration) to address the hypotheses that longer term follow-up (beyond 12 months) will show that the Demonstration is more effective and more successful for children with serious emotional disturbance (SED). The effects of the Demonstration are examined in comparison to those of traditional care by analyzing 12 key mental health outcomes with a random regression model, and the potential impact of attrition on results is explored. Results show neither hypothesis is supported, and the attrition analysis showed that the influence of missing data on the outcome analyses is negligible. Implications of these results for mental health policy are discussed.