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Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands -
Adolescent Mental Health Intitiative (AMHI)
Department faculty are engaged in a major professional and public outreach education effort – the Adolescent Mental Health Initiative (AMHI). Funded by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, and made possible by the generosity and vision of Ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg, the project is administered through the Annenberg Public Policy Center in partnership with the Oxford University Press. The AMHI addresses a major public health issue – although one in five youths in the United States suffers from a current developmental, emotional, or behavioral problem, many of these young people are neither adequately diagnosed nor treated. Faced with this virtually unrecognized public health crisis, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PhD, former Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and now Director of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn, enlisted Chair Dwight L. Evans, MD and Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology, to lead a national effort to educate mental health professionals and the lay public about the treatment and prevention of mental health disorders in adolescents.
The AMHI was officially launched in 2003 when seven scholarly commissions made up of over 150 leading psychiatrists and psychologists from around the country were convened in Philadelphia and New York. Six commissions were charged with assessing the state of scientific research on those mental disorders typically first occurring between the ages of 10 and 22 – anxiety, schizophrenia, substance and alcohol abuse, depression and bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and suicide. The seventh commission focused on achieving positive youth development. Besides Drs. Evans, Department of Psychiatry faculty members Edna Foa, PhD, Raquel Gur, MD, PhD, and Charles O’Brien, MD, PhD each chaired the commissions in their respective areas of expertise. In all, 19 members of the Department served as commission members.
The AMHI has already delivered the first of three planned products. In 2005, Oxford University Press, with the Annenberg Foundation, published Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders: What We Know and What We Don’t Know. Based on the work of the seven commissions and intended for both professionals and non-professionals, this volume describes the most common adolescent mental health disorders and presents the most promising treatments, prevention strategies, and research directions for each. The book was named the best book in clinical medicine published in 2005 by the Association of American Publishers, the principal trade association of the book publishing industry. The second prong of the AMHI’s effort is a series of books designed primarily for parents of adolescents with specific mental health disorders. All four of the planned volumes have been completed – on depression/bipolar disorder, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia. The third planned product consists of a second series of four books, targeted for adolescent readers themselves and written by individuals who suffered mental health disorders during adolescence. The volumes on depression and bipolar disorder have been completed and volumes on weight and eating disorders and social anxiety are in preparation.