Episode 27: Dr. Jessica Schleider of Stonybrook on the evidence on single session therapy in mental health.
Dr. Jessica L. Schleider (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program at Stony Brook University (SUNY). She also serves as a Faculty Affiliate at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and was an Academic Consultant to the World Bank's Education Global Practice.
Dr. Schleider completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University in 2018, along with an APA-accredited Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Yale School of Medicine.
Efforts to prevent and treat youth mental health problems have advanced greatly, but they have not reduced overall rates of youth mental illness. Low access to services exacerbates this problem: In the United States, up to 80% of youths in need of psychological services never access them. Dr. Schleider’s research program aims to help address this discrepancy by:
Developing brief, accessible interventions to help reduce mental health problems at scale, with a focus on adolescent depression and related disorders;
Identifying mechanisms of change and treatment-matching strategies to build potent, personalized interventions;
Testing novel approaches to dissemination in non-traditional settings (beyond brick-and-mortar clinics)
Towards these objectives, her work focuses on two interconnected targets that are expected to inform the design of such interventions: familial processes, such as parents’ expectancies for psychotherapy and caregiving behaviors, and youth cognitions, such perceived control, hopelessness, and beliefs about whether personal traits are malleable (versus fixed) by nature.
Details about the lab’s latest work are available at our website: Current Projects at the Lab for Scalable Mental Health
