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. Perhaps as a consequence, I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. So, in middle school and high school, I read books on “how to become a doctor.” In one of those books, the author said that if one wants to become a doctor, one should not major in biology or chemistry, as that would make one boring to too many people. Instead, one should study something else before medical school, 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 didn’t want to become a psychologist...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 started and did many large-scale studies in the 10 years I was at NIH. We continued and finished those studies for the next 20 years thereafter, and those findings changed the field of child mental health over subsequent decades. But most people were initially more interested in other non-psychological topics, such as the impact of genes and neurochemistry. But I think COVID has forced many people to realize that many children (and adults) are very affected by mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Consequently, in the U.S. and across the world, there is now more interest in mental health than there was 30-40 years ago, and when I first completed my psychiatry training. Thus in some ways, COVID has had a positive impact. But while it is also clear that our treatments for mental health problems are often effective, they are not good enough. So, we need more large-scale studies, and we need another generation of researchers to start the next set of studies.
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 (1-3), which was about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), probably has 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 from it, we now have about 180 published papers. So, this single study generated a huge amount of research (and interest in child mental health), and it also became a premier example for conducting subsequent similar studies on depression, anxiety, aggression, and autism in children — essentially a template for research in multiple areas of pediatric mental health — a landmark study that has 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 pediatric mental health. Currently, we have multiple medicines and psychotherapies that are effective treatments for every pediatric mental health problem. So that is a major difference from past decades. From this research, we also now know that the most effective treatments are medications combined with 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 children’s 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 sufficiently high percentage either. We have 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 therapists who are trained to deliver these proven treatments.
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 serve on an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviewed protocols funded by the National Cancer Institute for all of northern California, including UC San Francisco (UCSF). Many hospitals were included, and they all relied on this IRB for their cancer protocols. But this IRB was just one of many regional IRBs across the US, all supported by the National Cancer Institute. So I found it amazing that the Federal Government could enable research in this way, such that any oncologist in private practice could include his/her patients in the nation’s most important leading clinical trials, with his research overseen by the local/regional IRB. So if so many oncologists across the country could be involved in major clinical trials to develop even better cancer treatments, I wondered, why were we not doing the same for child 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 and therapists 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 in practice knew how to help children with trauma. Here, in NYC we had an urgent need, but none of our practitioners knew the latest research, and in fact, our doctors and therapists were 15-20 years behind the latest research! While at my own university, I knew that we could help train doctors right here in our city, but I could not easily go to other cities (or even states) to help. I realized that we needed an independent organization that could go to any city, any state, and become “partners” to train the doctors and therapists in these other areas. That was why we decided to establish the REACH Institute — so we can take the latest research findings to help doctors and therapists, regardless of where they are — in 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. To effectively train any doctor (or therapist) in the latest, most effective treatments, it cannot be one or two lectures – it takes time, in fact, it takes an additional 6 months of training, done while they are already in practice, already seeing other patients. For these 8000 practicing doctors, each doctor already has 2000-3000 children that they treat each year within their office practices. Of these children already under their care, 20% will have significant mental health problems (e.g., 500-600 children). So, if you do the math (8000 doctors x 500 children/doctor), that totals to 4 million children with mental health problems that these newly trained doctors can now help, IF they receive our training and support. Once trained, these doctors can now help most of their children with mental health problems. While I know we have made a significant impact on the U.S. and North American children with mental health problems, recent estimates indicate that as many as 16 million US children suffer from mental health problems. So we still have a lot of work to do.
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 both as a doctor and as a researcher, that I may see and hear things that might constitute 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.
References
A 14-month randomized clinical trial of treatment strategies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The MTA Cooperative Group. Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1999;56(12):1073-1086.
- Moderators and mediators of treatment response for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: the Multimodal Treatment Study of children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1999;56(12):1088-1096.
- Jensen PS, Hinshaw SP, Swanson JM, et al. Findings from the NIMH Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD (MTA): implications and applications for primary care providers. J Dev Behav Pediatr 2001;22(1):60-73.