Peter S. Jensen1, Jin Ye Yeo2
1The REACH Institute, NY, NY, USA; University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, USA; 2PM Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company
Correspondence to: Jin Ye Yeo. PM Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company. Email: pm@amegroups.com
This interview can be cited as: Jensen PS, Yeo JY. Meeting the Editorial Board Member of PM: Dr. Peter S. Jensen. Pediatr Med. 2024. Available from: https://pm.amegroups.org/post/view/meeting-the-editorial-board-member-of-pm-dr-peter-s-jensen.
Expert introduction
Dr. Peter S. Jensen (Figure 1) is the Board Chair of the REACH Institute, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization he founded in 2006. In 2014, he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, moving to Adjunct Professor in 2018. Dr. Jensen was the lead NIMH investigator on the Multimodal Treatment of ADHD study (MTA) and served on other multi-site NIMH national studies. He has held many national offices, including President of the International Society for Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Secretary and Council Member (American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry), and a member of CHADD’s Board and Scientific Advisory Board.
Dr. Jensen has authored/edited over 300 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and multiple books. He has received many awards for research and teaching from multiple national organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the Society for Child Psychiatric Nursing, NAMI, the Hall of Fame Award from CHADD, and the Purpose Prize Award from AARP.
In 2006, Dr. Jensen founded the national non-profit, the REACH Institute, an organization dedicated to ensuring that the most effective, scientifically proven mental health care reaches all children and families. Since its founding, REACH has provided thousands of primary care providers, therapists, and healthcare institutions with hands-on training in the best evidence-based therapies needed to better diagnose, treat, and manage child and adult mental health issues.
Figure 1 Dr. Peter S. Jensen
Interview
PM: What initially sparked your interest in child and adolescent psychiatry?
Dr. Jensen: Growing up, I was frequently sick and had to undergo various surgeries. And I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. So, in middle school and high school, I always read books on how to become a doctor. In one of those books, it said that if one wants to become a doctor, one should not only major in biology or chemistry, as that would make one boring to too many people. Instead, one should study something else before that, and I thought that was good advice. So, I decided to study psychology in college, partly because as a kid, I lost two of my siblings, and I had to deal with loss and grief. But I still wanted to go to medical school. Hence when I applied to medical school, I had the goal of becoming a psychiatry doctor.
In medical school and residency, I had very good supervisors who advised me to follow my passion and research, and I realized I was very drawn to the child and adolescent area. From my experience, I could see many things in my childhood that could make a person sad, so I thought those areas would be important things to study.
PM: How has your involvement in large-scale studies shaped your approach to research in child psychiatry, particularly in understanding complex mental health conditions?
Dr. Jensen: We did many large-scale studies in the 10 years I was at NIH. We continued and finished those studies for the next 20 years after, so it changed the research for children in those 20 years. But people started getting interested in other topics, like genes and biochemistry. I think COVID has forced many people to realize that many children are very affected by mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Inherently, in the U.S. and across the world, there is more interest now in mental health than they were 20 years ago when I just started in the area. In some ways, COVID has had a positive impact. But it is also clear that while our treatments for mental health problems are good, they are not good enough. So, we need more large-scale studies, and we need another generation of researchers to start doing these studies again.
PM: In your opinion, which of your studies or projects do you feel have had the most impact on child and adolescent mental health care?
Dr. Jensen: I think the first study we started, called the MTA (1), which was about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), probably had the greatest effect. We knew a bit about ADHD before the study, but the study really showed how powerful the treatments for ADHD are. That study had about 800 children involved across seven sites, and we did about 180 to 200 published papers. So, it was a huge number of studies, and it became a good example for conducting subsequent similar studies on depression, anxiety, aggression, and autism in children. The MTA study became the template that led to dramatic improvements in the aforementioned areas, which I feel is a landmark historical study that changed the field of child mental health.
PM: The landscape of child and adolescent mental health care has changed significantly over the past few decades. What are some of the most exciting developments you have witnessed in the field?
Dr. Jensen: None of our treatments are curative yet, but I think the most exciting development is that people are now more aware of mental health. Currently, we have multiple medicines and therapies that are effective treatments for every mental health problem. So that is a big difference. We also now know that the most effective treatment is medicine plus psychotherapy, which we did not know 25 years ago. Another important improvement is that people are now more accepting of the fact that their child might have some mental health problems, so more people are getting more care for their problems. But, have we cured any of those problems? Yes, for some people. For example, when treating ADHD and depression, maybe 25-40% of people become better for the rest of their lives compared to 5-10% in the past. That is not too bad, but it is not a high percentage either. So we made progress, but we also have a long way to go.
PM: Given your expertise in child mental health, what do you see as the most pressing unmet needs in the field today?
Dr. Jensen: The most pressing need is to expand the availability of trained service providers, doctors, or therapists so that any family can find somebody who knows how to treat mental health problems. Currently, 2 out of 3 families cannot find someone who knows how to do it, and this is pretty much consistent across the world. We need more doctors, and doctors who are trained in this aspect.
PM: As a founder of the REACH Institute, you played a key role in improving mental health care for children. What motivated you to establish REACH?
Dr. Jensen: When I finished my initial training in medical school, my dream was to work at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and begin doing large-scale, multi-site studies. During my psychiatry residency in San Francisco, I had the chance to sit on an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviewed protocols funded by the National Cancer Institute for all of northern California, including UC San Francisco. Many hospitals were included, and they coordinated cancer protocols that were multi-site cancer studies, and it was just one of those regional sites. The National Cancer Institute has multiple regional IRBs, and I thought that it was amazing what the Federal Government could do with research because even an oncologist in practice could bring his patients into the nation’s most important leading clinical trials. I could see that all these oncologists across the country were so often involved in big clinical trials trying to develop an even better cancer treatment, and I wondered why we were not doing the same for mental health.
Fast forward to when I was at Columbia University, 9/11 happened, and I was asked by the New York state and the university to train doctors all across the state in how to help children with trauma after 9/11. So we started that process, and it was very clear that even though we had many new therapies, none of the therapists knew how to help children with trauma. Here, we have a need, and no one knows the research, and that was when I learned that these doctors and therapists are 15-20 years behind. At the university, I could see that we could do things that would help doctors in the city, but I could not go to other cities to help. I realized if we do not have an independent organization that could go to any city, any state, and become partners, that could not be done. That was why we decided to establish the REACH Institute, so we can take the latest research findings to help any university, city, state, or healthcare organization.
PM: In your opinion, what have been some of the most rewarding outcomes of this institute’s work?
Dr. Jensen: The most rewarding thing is that we have trained over 8000 doctors in the U.S. and Canada. For every doctor, it is not just a lecture; it is an additional 6 months of training after they finish medical school or residency. For these 8000 doctors, each doctor has 2000-3000 children that they have to treat. So, if you do the math, that is about 24 million children. Those doctors now know how to help with most of the mental health problems. With that statistic, I know we have made a major impact on the U.S. and North America. But we are only a quarter of the way there. We still have a lot to accomplish.
PM: As an Editorial Board Member, what are your expectations and aspirations for PM?
Dr. Jensen: I hope that it can be an avenue to get cutting-edge ideas and science that has not found its way out yet. I learned, as a doctor, that I may see and hear things that might be an important scientific finding, but how do I get those ideas out into the literature and make sure that researchers see, test, and disseminate these ideas? I see the journal as a fertile ground for growing new and cutting-edge ideas.
Reference
- Richters JE, Arnold LE, Jensen PS, et al. NIMH collaborative multisite multimodal treatment study of children with ADHD: I. Background and rationale. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry, 1995;34(8):987-1000.