About MST
The key goals of MST are to break the cycle of anti-social behaviour by keeping young people safely at home, in school, and out of trouble.
What is MST?
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) is a systemic, intensive family and community-based intervention for children, young people and their families where children and young people are at risk of out of home placement in either care or custody.
MST is based on many years of research into what works for families and therapists use approaches, such as behavioural therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and structured family therapy to work with young people and their families. This evidence base has shown that the MST approach achieves excellent, long-term results for young people and families.
Ecological Model
MST and MST-CAN teams focus on understanding the whole world of children and young people - their homes and families, schools and teachers, neighbourhoods and friends. MST staff go out and meet families where they live and work with them intensively for three to five months (longer in MST-CAN), including being on call for families 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
How is MST delivered?
MST is delivered by a Therapist, whose aim is to:
- work intensively with parents or carers to empower them with the tools and resources to manage the young person’s behaviours;
- increase young people’s engagement with and success in education and training;
- promote positive activities for parent and young person;
- reduce young people’s offending and/or anti-social behaviour;
- improve family relationships;
- tackle underlying problems in the young person or parent, including substance misuse.
Therapy sessions typically last between 50 minutes and two hours.
The frequency of the sessions may vary depending on the needs of the family and the stage of the treatment, typically ranging from three days a week to daily.
What happens during the intervention?
The MST model views the parents as the primary agents of change. Each family’s treatment plan therefore includes a variety of strategies to improve the parents’ effectiveness and the quality of their relationship with their child. It is essential that these strategies ‘fit’ with each family’s unique set of strengths and weaknesses.
A key aim of the therapy is to identify strategies that work for each individual young person and family. Work is also undertaken with the network of formal and informal supports around the young person and family to improve family relationships with agencies such as schools but also to develop sustainable positive supports in the community.
A second aim of the intervention is to help families assume greater responsibility for their behaviours and generate solutions and skills for solving their family problems now and in the future. A variety of evidence based intervention strategies are used with individuals, families, and caregivers, including family sessions, role plays, structural and strategic family therapy, parent training, including use of behaviour plans, safety planning, and cognitive behavioural therapy. There may also be specific targeted interventions for substance abuse in young people.
The strategies follow a set of MST principles and the MST analytical process, so that problems are resolved in a strategic way with the families. All of these interventions are related to the aims of (1) reducing antisocial / offending and high-risk behaviours in young people, (2) keeping young people safely at home, improving family relationships and reducing out-of-home placement, and (3) helping support young people to be successful in school, work and other community activities.