Community capacity and teleconference counseling in rural Texas.

Abstract

How can psychologists aid in addressing current disparities in accessibility to meet the mental health needs of rural areas? In this paper, we discuss an innovative partnership created between community leaders in a rural county and an APA-accredited doctoral training program and its mental health clinic at a regional Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) to provide mentalhealth services. We describe the efforts to build community capacity to develop the partnership and provide sustainable mental health services via teleconferencing to a remote site in a rural county. Also, to presentinitial evidence of the services’ effectiveness in alleviatingclientdistress,aswellasmeetingtheexpectationsofreferralsourcesandcommunitystakeholders, we used the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), the SF-12v.2, and a qualitative community survey. We examined data from a maximum of 68 clients ( M age 5 40.5, SD 5 14.1; 48 females and 20 males); the number of available client data varied by analysis. We found that clients showed significant decreases in depressive symptoms ( M decrease 5 5.88, SD 5 7.16, p , .001) and significant increases Mental Health Composite Scores (MCS; Mincrease 511.39, SD 57.94, p ,.005). Results from the community survey revealed encouraging results as well as areas for improvement. Implications of developing community capacity for sustainable psychological services in rural areas are discussed.