Good Enough? Interventions for Child Mental Health: From Adoption to Adaptation—From Programs to Systems

Abstract

This special issue examines essential challenges and successes for developing, implementing, and disseminating evidence-based psychological interventions for child and adolescent development and mental health. The main aims are to identify what evidence is “good enough” for roll-out, if and how interventions need to be adapted to developmental diversity and contextual variation, and how they relate to complex systemic contexts. Themes of the special issue are twofold and first include questions about adoption versus adaptation, in terms of both developmental tailoring and cultural adaptation of existing intervention programs. Second, the issue tackles questions about what systems of support are needed to ensure the system readiness for child and adolescent mental health interventions. We argue that moving from simple adoption to dynamic adaptation and from programs to collaborative systems offers new perspectives for developing and implementing flexible protocols and strategies that allow adapted intervention. The special issue raises broader questions of whether current intervention programs and practices are good enough in moving us from mere adoption to innovation in system readiness, or whether we need to do more before we can claim that interventions are good enough for roll-out.