ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry
Sec. Interventions for Adolescent Mental Health
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frcha.2025.1516782
This article is part of the Research TopicDismantling Disparities: Advancing Mental Healthcare Access for Diverse YouthView all 4 articles
Culturally Informed and Flexible Family Based Treatment for Adolescents: Enhancements and Adaptations to Better Serve Adolescents with Self-Harm Behavior
Provisionally accepted
Maite Mena1*
Gabrielle M del Rey1Melissa Gutierrez1
Karina Gattamorta1
Rebecca A Lazarus1Daniel A Santisteban2- 1University of Miami, Coral Gables, United States
- 2Training and Implementation Associates, Miami, United States
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Culturally Informed and Flexible Family Based Treatment for Adolescents (CIFFTA) is a manualized treatment that has been shown to reduce youth substance misuse (Santisteban et al., 2011) and a variety of behavior problems (Santisteban et al., 2022) but it has not been used to treat self-harm behavior in youth. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe enhancements that can address the treatment needs of diverse (Latine, Black, LGBTQ+) youth reporting suicide risk, cutting, and other self-harming behavior. We describe the enhancements to psychoeducational, individual therapy and family therapy content and processes as well as technological enhancements to improve access to treatment and to engage the adolescent in therapeutic work between therapy sessions. We believe that to help reduce barriers to service utilization in diverse populations, the treatment must also be ecologically valid (Bernal & Scharron-del Rio, 2001). We present the case of a 15 year old Latine female who received treatment for cutting behavior and demonstrate CIFFTA’s components in action. As we have reported separately (Santisteban et al., 2025b), the acceptability of this enhanced intervention is supported by data showing that 93% of the youth and families attended at least 8 sessions and that on average they received over 23 sessions of treatment. This treatment enhancement effort resulted in new tools that were integrated into the manualized CIFFTA making it easier to engage families and deliver interventions. These enhancements culminated in a replicable and culturally informed treatment for diverse youth reporting self-harm and their families.
Keywords: Family Therapy, Adolescent, culture, self-harm and suicide related behavior, CIFFTA
Received: 24 Oct 2024; Accepted: 13 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mena, del Rey, Gutierrez, Gattamorta, Lazarus and Santisteban. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Maite Mena, University of Miami, Coral Gables, United States
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