Mental Health Landscape 2.0

Overview

The team from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville proposes to work with the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services on an extension of a project originally funded by TDOE and designed to map the landscape of mental health services and needs in K-12 school districts in the state of Tennessee (Landscape 1.0). Dr. Coatsworth, from the College of Social Work will serve as PI for this project, and Dr. Cochran, from the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department will serve as co-PI. Both were in those roles in the original TDOE-funded project (Landscape 1.0). Landscape 1.0 project conducted formal interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders and compiled information about mental health needs and services from publicly available data sources (e.g., web-searches). Landscape 1.0 provided district snapshots, regional overview reports and statewide recommendations using these data sources only. This project (Landscape 2.0) focuses on distributing surveys to school and community personnel to gather data regarding perceptions of student mental health needs, reports of services being provided and service gaps, and perceptions of effective services that could be expanded. Reports will be generated that incorporate these Landscape 2.0 survey data into the Landscape 1.0 reports to provide more complete overview of needs and services for K-12 schools.