A Crisis Prevention Program in Youth With Autism Spectrum Disorder

When a child or adolescent experiences a mental health crisis, it is a devastating and potentially life-threating event. Beyond the hazard of injury, mental health crises can have a life-altering impact on the child (repeated trauma, development of future psychopathology), family members (increased stress and poorer well-being) and society as a whole (cost and disability). Our inability to prevent or identify those in crisis is reflected in the rising rates of suicides, extensive wait times and overcrowding in emergency departments, and the jailing of people with mental illness.

Mental health crises are defined as a) the presence of acute psychiatric symptoms that require immediate attention or intervention and b) the perceived (by the informant) lack of immediate resources to manage these symptoms. Similar to the concepts of impairment or distress, mental health crisis is a transdiagnostic construct that applies to all psychiatric problems, from self-injury to aggression to psychosis to substance abuse.

The recently developed Mental Health Crisis Assessment Scale-Revised (MCAS-R), developed by a team of expert clinical and public health researchers, was specifically designed to address the current gap in crisis measurement for autistic children. The MCAS-R is a 23-item parental report, which takes no more than 10 minutes to complete, that measures crisis in two conceptually-based subscales, acuity and behavioral efficacy, reflecting both the core elements of crisis. Based on the cutoffs, it has been shown to accurately identify crises in 9 out of 10 autistic children. Recent work suggests between 20-25% of children served in outpatient mental health are at risk of a mental health crisis, as identified by the validated MCAS cutoff.

At present, no crisis prevention programs exist for autistic children. There are certainly numerous community-based crisis intervention programs, outpatient mental health treatment approaches, and parent behavioral training programs. However, no programs exist that aim to prevent a crisis from occurring. The goal of this study is to fill this gap by providing families with tools before their child's behavior becomes acute.

The goals of this study are to examine: 1) child and parent outcomes associated with a novel crisis prevention program for autistic children; 2) gather survey-based feedback from parents, post-intervention, to understand feasibility and utility of the crisis prevention program.