Mental Health

Mental Health programs work with youth to promote the youth’s recognition of their abilities and help identify coping skills to assist with improving mental health well-being. A mental health program may use screening tools and assessments to identify mental health diagnoses to further tailor the program to meet the needs of the youth. Treatment focused mental health programs provide services to the youth that will help promote cognitive mental functioning through client-focused therapeutic options.

Evaluating mental health Programs

As part of our yearly evaluations for Community-based Juvenile Services Aid funded programs in fiscal year 2025, the JJI, in partnership with the NCC, developed evaluation matrices to categorize important outcomes for each program type evaluated. The following categories describe the important program outcome indicators for mental health programs. These categories can be used to assess the standing of a program in terms of whether it is successfully applying best practices and meeting expectations or common goals for such programs.

Click here for the Mental Health Program Evaluation Matrix PDF

evaluation framework

Any program assessment must start by reviewing what data is available on processes and outcomes. Incomplete data or small sample sizes (i.e. few client cases) increase the risk of error in analysis. Shreffler and Huecker (2023) describe what Type I and II errors are – with high risks for error we might fail to identify a positive impact that’s occurring or falsely state the program was effective when it wasn’t. Small sample sizes run the risk of an outlier (one or two cases with unique, or very low/high values in an outcome) skewing the results.

A major goal of the Community-based Juvenile Services Aid (CBA) and Juveniles Services Commission Grant (JS) funding is to provide community-based services for juveniles who come in contact with the juvenile justice system and prevent youth from moving deeper into the system. All CBA/JS funded programs are evaluated on how effective they are at preventing future system involvement (FSI) after youth are discharged from the program. FSI is evaluated in two ways – 1) comparing FSI between successful cases and unsuccessful cases and 2) overall FSI for all youth served. Evaluating these metrics gives a program the overall picture of FSI for the youth they come into contact with and helps programs more deeply understand how successful completion or discharge from their program impacts FSI of youth.

The “total possible points” will include all categories with enough data to evaluate. If a specific category cannot be evaluated due to missing data or non-applicable categories, these points will not count against the program. Instead, the new total possible points will be calculated based on categories with available data. However, if a program is unable to be evaluated on two or more categories, the evaluation will be considered “inconclusive.”

The following is a brief review of some of the existing literature related to mental health programs to further explain the importance of evaluating mental health outcomes in rating program effectiveness.

Brief literature review

No matter how well a program implements best practices and effective interventions in their processes, if the program is not consistently engaging youth and maintaining the clients through the entire program to a successful discharge, they are unlikely to experience substantial change or progress. Menjivar (2023) with Mental Health America notes that often youth voices “are shut out of the design” (para. 1) of mental health programs. Mental health intervention and prevention models that are youth-centered and even designed with youth collaboration can be more successful at keeping youth engaged throughout the program.

Tracking youths’ progress at discharge allows programs to measure positive or negative changes within patients and interventions which can help show effectiveness. Jaffa and Stott (1999) found, “of those who made significant gains during treatment... approximately one quarter improved further during follow-up period [and] approximately one half maintained improvement...”(p. 298). A way to improve youths’ experiences at discharge is to create a discharge plan. Creating a plan will not only help an individual to have a successful discharge, but can also help an individual stay successful after discharge. This can be particularly important in decreasing rehospitalization or returning to a program.

Mental health systems, such as community-based care can reduce/delay entry into the Juvenile Justice System and can reduce recidivism (i.e., reoffending) in youth they serve when used properly. Foster and colleagues (2004) showed that integrated care provides a greater decrease in juvenile justice entry and recidivism than coordinated care, but both types decreased the likelihood of entry and recidivism.

Mental Health Program Evaluation Webinar 4.16.25.