Mental health is an important component of overall health in children and adolescents. Due to various reasons, a high level of care is often needed to address mental health concerns. Acute psychiatric hospitalization is often necessary to evaluate, stabilize and treat adolescents with severe mental illnesses.

Understanding the need of mental health resources and ensuring that those resources are readily available for adolescents after discharging from acute psychiatric hospitals is critical. Following hospital discharge, psychiatric aftercare enhances and maintains recovery by addressing psychological factors that contribute to mental illness, boosting psychosocial support, enhancing medication compliance, and offering prompt attention to illness exacerbations. Currently adolescents may experience a gap in mental health service for various reasons.

This capstone will explore current discharge processes, possible reasons for delays in mental health services; and present the possible solution of stakeholders from involved agencies developing agency-based policies that would utilize the convenience of school based mental health services as a means to provide a continuum of care for adolescents discharging from acute psychiatric hospitals.