Unfolding the Wisdom Within: CFT for Adolescents in Residential Care

Residential care youth show extensive mental health intervention needs due to history of maltreatment and embedded characteristics of residential placement, leading to harmful and cumulative effects throughout development, linked to internalizing and externalizing difficulties. However, existing interventions show limited suitability and poor randomized effectiveness evaluation. To overcome these shortcomings, a new compassion-based program for adolescents in residential care will be developed. A non-randomized trial will be run, testing the program´s effects over adolescents' psychological functioning and investigating whether changes in compassion are associated with changes over time in mental health difficulties. The moderator effect of age, gender and maltreatment history will be investigated. Findings intend to: improve mental-health of youth in residential care, provide an evidence-based intervention to be delivered in residential care settings, increase empirical support of compassion-based interventions, amplifying its scope of delivery.