School-based health centers (SBHC) are small primary care clinics that deliver preventive and primary care, as well as counseling, health education, and dental services, to children and adolescents where they are much of the day — in school. As more school officials, health care administrators and practitioners, parents, and students realize the benefits of high quality physical and behavioral SBHC care, the popularity of the centers has grown. Over the last couple of years, more Maine SBHCs have added mental health counseling to their service delivery mix. The addition of these early intervention, crisis intervention, prevention, and treatment services has come about as SBHC and school personnel recognize that many students have an assortment of mental health concerns (e.g. substance abuse, relationship problems, sexual and physical abuse) that need to be addressed if students are to succeed academically. What is not known, at least in Maine, is how best to provide mental health services in a SBHC setting. As more SBHCs without mental health services seek to add these services, careful consideration should be given on how to integrate these services into a SBHC program.
The Maine Center for Disease and Control and Prevention’s Teen and Young Adult Health (TYAH)
Program provides operational support to many of the state’s SBHCs. For this study, the TYAH Program partnered with the Edmund S. Muskie School’s Institute for Public Sector Innovation to examine a range of school-based mental health services/issues in Maine. This report encompasses five studies. The first three listed below deal with SBHC mental health services and the last two cover the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Maine (NAMI-Maine) efforts to address teen depression and suicide in a school setting. The report

title comes from the third study listed below. The five studies are:
1. An Assessment of Mental Health Services at all Maine SBHCs
2. Funding Mechanisms/Categories for Maine Adolescent Mental Health Services
3. Contributing Factors of Successful Maine SBHC Mental Health Programs
4. Curriculum Evaluation for Understanding Mental Illness Training
5. Curriculum Evaluation for Out of the Shadows Training

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