MULTISYSTEMIC THERAPY (mst)

definition

• • Multisystemic therapy (MST) is an intensive familyand community-based treatment that addresses multiple aspects of serious antisocial behavior in adolescents.  MST typically targets chronic, aggressive juvenile offenders who are at high risk of out-of-home placement away from their famiies.  The Multisystemic approach views the youth's behavior as being influenced by the surrounding "systems" - family, peer, school and neighborhood - as well as by the youth's thoughts and feelings about those systems.
    
    MST addresses the many factors that are known to contribute to delinquency across thekey settings, or systems, within which youth live, work and play.  MST strives to promote behav ior changes in the youth's natural environment, using the strengths of each system (e.g., family, peers , school, neighborhood) to facilitate change.  Therapeutic contacts emphasize the positive and use systemic strengths as levers for change.  Interventions promote responsible behavior among family members and are present-fcused, action oriented and developmentally appropriate.  In addition, the interventions target specific, well defined problems and are designed to require daily or weekly effort by family members.  They incorporatestrategies that promote treatment generalization and long-term maintenance of therapeutic change. 
    
    The primary goals of MST programs are to decrease rates of antisocial behavior and other clinical problems - to give parents the skills and resources necessary to help them independently address the difficulties that arise in teenagers - to improve functioning by empowering youth to cope with family, peer, school and neighborhood problems and to achieve these outcomes at a cost savings by reducing the use of out-of=-home placements (e.g. incarceration, esidential treatment, hospitalization).
  • MST incorporates empirically - based treatments insofar as they exist.  MST programs include cognitive behavioral approaches, the behavior therapies,  behavioral management parent training, pragmatic family therapies, and certain pharmacological interventions that have a reasonable evidence base. 
  • MST is a home-based therapy.  It is designed to overcome barriers to service, to increase family retention in treatment, to allow for the provision of intensive services (i.e., therapists have low caseloads), and to enhance the maintenance of successful behavior changes.  MST intervention is available to youth and families 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via an on-call system that is staffed by MST team members.  The ususal duration of MST treatment is an average of four(4) months with an expected range of three (3) to five (5) months.