Latin American teams visit New York City for training
Dan Herman and Sarah Conover (back row left) along with trainees from Argentina, Brazil and Chile at Silberman School of Social Work, NYC.
Practitioners and researchers from three Latin American countries in the NIMH-funded RedeAmericas regional mental health network spent the last two weeks of May in New York City where they received intensive training organized by Sarah Conover at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. The training focused on a task-shifting adaptation of the CTI model, in which qualified workers in the community take over tasks from mental health specialists. Critical Time Intervention-Task Shifting (CTI-TS) is designed to help individuals in the initial phase of treatment for a psychotic illness develop enduring ties to mental health and primary healthcare services and community supports, as well as to learn skills for promoting their own recovery. CTI-TS will be tested in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Buenos Aires in a randomized trial led by principal investigators from Columbia University and the University of Chile.