Engaging multiproblem families in treatment: Lessons learned throughout the development of multisystemic therapy

Multisystemic therapy (MST) is a family-based treatment model that has achi eved high rates of treatment completion with youths who present serious cli nical problems, and their families. The success of MST in, engaging challen ging families in treatment is due to programmatic commitments to family col laboration and partnership as well as to a conceptual process that delineat es barriers to family engagement, develops and implements strategies to ove rcome these barriers, and evaluates the success of these strategies. This a rticle provides an, overview of the nonspecific/universal engagement strate gies used by MST therapists, frequently observed barriers to achieving ther apist-family engagement, and specific strategies to overcome a sampling of these barriers.