Measurement-Based Care and Causality in Behavioral Health: A Practical Guide

Measurement-based care is an expanding practice in behavioral health. Although it offers great potential for enhancing services and improving outcomes, it is often experienced as burdensome or as an intrusion. In many circumstances, this is because a concept of measurement that is more befitting traditional science or a population-level study is introduced into care processes that require attentiveness to what is individual in experience. What behavioral health providers require is a form of measurement that grows naturally from this environment and their workaday practice: one that originates from within their professional intuition and expertise and extends them.This book is for social workers, case managers, peer specialists, counselors, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral health administrators, or any provider of services who want their care to be evidence-based in a rigorous sense while still respecting the boundaries of a client-centered process. It presents the foundations of measurement from the everyday world of service provision and introduces measurement theory, the concepts of measurement-based care, uncertain reasoning, and causal inference as philosophical developments that intimately relate to familiar ideas and practices in the clinical domain. Behavioral health providers can use these developments to translate what they implicitly already do into graphs and new forms of expression that can further solidify case formulations and scaffold treatment. The motto of this book is `measurement that is a burden is measurement misapplied.' What emerges from this guide is a measurement-based care of the provider. It can only be a burden if the provider elects to make it so.Every concept and method explored in this guide is accessible. No background in measurement theory or philosophy is required. Everything covered is also practical. If it cannot be done painlessly on the street or in an ad hoc team meeting, then it has no place as a regular activity in the clinical world. Care is the focus. Measurement is only a medium. Read more