RISE · Prevention of child mental health problems in Southeastern Europe - Adapt, Optimize, Test, and Extend Parenting for Lifelong Health

Significant burden of mental health disorders in LMIC could be prevented if effective services, especially early interventions, were more widely available. Nearly half of all mental disorders have an early onset before the age of 14 and often take a costly chronic course impacting social functioning, economic productivity as well as quality of life. Parenting interventions represent one approach to prevention of child mental health disorders, particular behavioral disorders, which could reduce the global burden of mental disorders in LMIC. However, addressing extending parenting intervention research to LMIC does not only require rigorous testing of the efficacy of interventions in new LMIC, but also requires increased attention to implementation, dissemination, and sustainability. This calls for a systematic empirical process that at a) adapts content and materials to the respective LMIC, b) tests the different components, c) subsequently, optimizes the intervention based on these initial results, and then d) re-tests the optimized intervention again while attending to broader contextual and economic influences. This is what we will propose for RISE. We will use an intervention that has been specifically designed for low resource settings and already been introduced and tested in other LMIC. The Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) is one of the first programs to provide early intervention parenting programs to prevent adverse childhood experiences and reduce child behavioral problems in LMIC. We plan to extend the program of research on PLH in three of the poorest countries in Europe where empirically-based prevention programs are in need of wide scale implementation. In RISE, we plan to innovatively combine the state-of-the art Multiphase Optimization Strategy for intervention research with a rigorous implementation science approach, which will allow RISE to make significant advances in the prevention of child behavioral disorders in Southeastern Europe.