Michelle R. Munson

Michelle Munson is a Professor at NYU Silver. She has professional interests in mental health services research and intervention development and testing, and her work centers on adolescents and young adults.

Dr. Munson’s research seeks to understand how society’s structural conditions and social relationships, through both verbal and non-verbal communication, shape young adults’ decisions to seek (or not seek) professional mental health services. Her research and scholarship also seeks to develop, refine, adapt, and test engagement and treatment interventions for adolescents and young adults with serious mental health conditions.

Dr. Munson and her colleagues are refining, testing, and adapting intervention programs (described below) aimed at positively orienting young people and their families toward seeking professional help when it is needed and improving the quality of mental health care for adolescents and young adults with serious mental health conditions.

The intervention programs use innovative and empirically-based communication strategies to capture young people’s attention and engage them in their care, including a dual provider team of a social worker and a peer. The programs also rely on modalities that youth favor to facilitate mental health conversations, such as creative arts and the use of narratives (or stories) surrounding mental health topics. Dr. Munson’s research centers the perspectives of youth, their families of choice, and their providers in order to develop services and intervention strategies that match the views of those who use them.

Just Do You is a brief meta-intervention for young adults experiencing one of their first-contacts with the adult mental health system. It was designed to help orient young people to their clinics, their programs, their providers, and typical mental health service components, while also encouraging them that they can be partners in their mental health care decisions.

Cornerstone is an empirically-informed intervention that draws on critical time intervention, trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy, peer support, mentorship, and extensive “in-vivo” practice, bringing transition age youth and their providers out into the community together to experience and engage in real world activities that support their goals. The intervention is provided during a critical time of transition, when youth and young adults commonly experience change in individual, relational and contextual domains of their lives.

Dr. Munson’s most recent research seeks to understand questions of access and utilization of professional mental health care relative to “alternative options” young adults use to manage their mental health symptoms. She and her colleagues have completed 150 in-person interviews with community members and young adults to build understanding on the mental health needs of young adults living in low-resourced communities and the multiple strategies that young adults choose to use to manage their mental health. The team is empirically testing mental health decision-making around managing mental health symptoms, while working with community advisors to design outreach strategies that will be acceptable within the community to identify young people in need and assist them in accessing preferred approaches to manage their health as needed.

Read more about these projects and others at the Youth and Young Adult Mental Health Group.

Broadly, Dr. Munson’s research focuses on answering three related questions among youth and young adults in varying contexts: 1) what multi-level factors influence utilization and investment in mental health services, 2) in what ways can intervention programs positively impact service use and ultimately mental health and life outcomes, and 3) how do social relationships (or lack of social relationships) influence these processes.

Two of Dr. Munson’s latest publications are innovative conceptual frameworks that bring together multidisciplinary research to stimulate the mental health services community as we drive toward improving engagement in care and healing from mental health problems in the 21st Century.

The first, published in Social Science and Medicine and entitled “Static, dynamic, integrated and contextualized: A framework for understanding mental health service utilization among young adults,” provides a springboard for examining questions around individuals intention and actual service use behaviors. The framework emerged directly from face-to- face interviews with young adults who transitioned from adolescence to adulthood with mental health challenges.

The second, published in Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research and entitled “Mental Health Service Use: A Communication Framework for Program Development,” addresses the fact that most mental health services research focuses on identifying the determinants of engagement. We suggest that such knowledge alone is not enough. Once identified, program designers need to use evidence-based principles to design programs to bring about change in the identified determinants. The framework is grounded in mental health services research, communication theory and evidence from related behavioral science research.

Dr. Munson has provided consultation to mentoring researchers, policy-makers and program designers, and mental health services and interventions researchers. She has been an invited expert reviewer for grants submitted to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Dr. Munson was also an invited reviewer for the Institute of Medicine’s state-of- the-art report entitled “Investing in the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults.”

Dr. Munson recently agreed to serve a three-year term on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Emerging Adulthood.

Dr. Munson directs the Youth and Young Adult Mental Health Group at NYU and she co-directs the New York University Mental Health co{lab}orative at the Silver School of Social Work, which is a group of faculty, post-doctoral and pre-doctoral scholars, and graduate students who meet together monthly to discuss ideas, emerging findings, and potential collaborations.

Dr. Munson has published in Psychiatric Services, Social Science and Medicine, Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Journal of Adolescent Research, Children and Youth Services Review, and the Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research, among others.

Dr. Munson’s research has been supported through funding mechanisms at the federal, state, and local levels.

Dr. Munson earned her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, her MSW at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and her BA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Impact of a brief intervention to improve engagement in a recovery program for young adults with serious mental illness 
Munson, M. R., Jaccard, J., Moore, K. L., Rodwin, A. H., Shimizu, R., Cole, A. R., ... & Stanhope, V., Dec 2022, In: Schizophrenia Research, 250, p. 104-111 8 p.

Methodologies to Advance a "Science of How": Identifying and Engaging Intervention Targets and Outcomes
Munson, M. R., Raghavan, R., Shimizu, R., Rodwin, A. H. & Jaccard, J., Sep 1 2022, In: Hospital and Community Psychiatry. 73, 9, p. 1039-1046 8 p.

Outcomes of a Metaintervention to Improve Treatment Engagement Among Young Adults With Serious Mental Illnesses: Application of a Pilot Randomized Explanatory Design.
Munson, M. R., Jaccard, J. J., Scott, L. D., Moore, K. L., Narendorf, S. C., Cole, A. R., Shimizu, R., Rodwin, A. H., Jenefsky, N., Davis, M. & Gilmer, T., Nov 2021, In : Journal of Adolescent Health. 69, 5 p. 790-796 7 p.

Mental Health Management Among Older Youth in Foster Care: Service Utilization and Preparedness
Munson, M. R., Katz, C., Okpych, N. J. & Courtney, M. E., Apr 18 2020, In : Journal of Adolescent Health., 7 p.

Toward an experimental therapeutics approach in human services research 
Raghavan, R., Munson, M. R. & Le, C., Jan 1 2019, In : Psychiatric Services. 70, 12, p. 1130-1137 8 p. 

A mixed-methods investigation into the perspectives on mental health and professional treatment among former system youth with mood disorders 
Munson, M. R., Narendorf, S. C., Ben-David, S. & Cole, A., 2019, In : American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 89, 1, p. 52-64 13 p. 

Youth and young adult mental health: Interventions, services, systems, and rehabilitation 
Davis, M. & Munson, M. R., Dec 2018, In : Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal.41, 4, p. 253-257 5 p. 

Eradicate social isolation 
Lubben, J. E., Tracy, E. M., Crewe, S. E., Sabbath, E. L., Gironda, M., Johnson, C., Kong, J., Munson, M. R. & Brown, S., Jan 1 2018, Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society. Oxford University Press, p. 103-123 21 p. 

Mental Health Service Use Among Young Adults: A Communication Framework for Program Development 
Munson, M. R. & Jaccard, J., Jan 1 2018, In : Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. 45, 1, p. 62-80 

Feeling Connected and Understood: The Role of Creative Arts in Engaging Young Adults in Their Mental Health Services 
Cole, A., Jenefsky, N., Ben-David, S. & Munson, M. R., 2018, In : Social Work with Groups. 41, 1-2, p. 6-20 

Integrated, overwhelmed, and distanced: Narratives of mental health among young adults with prior public system involvement 
Munson, M. R., Narendorf, S. C., Ben-David, S., Cole, A. & Floersch, J., 2018, In : Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research. 9, 3, p. 413-430 18 p. 

Social Context in Mental Health Service Use Among Young Adults 
Ben-David, S., Cole, A., Spencer, R., Jaccard, J. & Munson, M. R., Jan 1 2017, In : Journal of Social Service Research. 43, 1, p. 85-99 15 p. 

Symptoms, circumstances, and service systems: Pathways to psychiatric crisis service use among uninsured young adults 
Narendorf, S. C., Munson, M. R., Washburn, M., Fedoravicius, N., Wagner, R. & Flores, S. K., 2017, In : American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 87, 5, p. 585-596 12 p. 

Cornerstone program for transition-age youth with serious mental illness: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial 
Munson, M. R., Cole, A., Stanhope, V., Marcus, S. C., McKay, M., Jaccard, J. & Ben-David, S., Nov 8 2016, In : Trials. 17, 1, 537. 

Mental Illness: The Last Acceptable Stereotype? 
Munson, M., Ben-David, S., Cole, A.R. & Narendorf, S.C., Oct 20 2016, In : Youth Today.. 

An Engagement Intervention for Young Adults with Serious Mental Health Conditions 
Munson, M. R., Cole, A., Jaccard, J., Kranke, D., Farkas, K. & Frese, F. J., Oct 1 2016, In : p. 1130-1137 8 p. Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research. 43, 4, p. 542-563 22 p.

Supportive Relationships Among Former System Youth With Mental Health Challenges 
Munson, M. R., Brown, S., Spencer, R., Edguer, M. & Tracy, E., Jul 12 2015, In : Journal of Adolescent Research. 30, 4, p. 501-529 29 p. 

Emerging adulthood among former system youth: The ideal versus the real 
Munson, M. R., Lee, B. R., Miller, D., Cole, A. & Nedelcu, C., Jun 1 2013, In : Children and Youth Services Review. 35, 6, p. 923-929 7 p. 

Static, dynamic, integrated, and contextualized: A framework for understanding mental health service utilization among young adults 
Munson, M. R., Jaccard, J., Smalling, S. E., Kim, H., Werner, J. J. & Scott, L. D., Oct 1 2012, In : Social Science and Medicine. 75, 8, p. 1441-1449 9 p. 

Engagement in mental health treatment among adolescents and young adults: A systematic review 
Kim, H. S., Munson, M. R. & McKay, M. M., Jun 1 2012, In : Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal. 29, 3, p. 241-266 26 p. 

A qualitative investigation of self-stigma among adolescents taking psychiatric medication 
Kranke, D. A., Floersch, J., Kranke, B. O. & Munson, M. R., Aug 2011, In : Psychiatric Services. 62, 8, p. 893-899 7 p. 

A steady presence in the midst of change: Non-kin natural mentors in the lives of older youth exiting foster care 
Munson, M. R., Smalling, S. E., Spencer, R., Scott, L. D. & Tracy, E. M., Apr 1 2010, In : Children and Youth Services Review. 32, 4, p. 527-535 9 p. 

Attitudes toward mental health services and illness perceptions among adolescents with mood disorders 
Munson, M. R., Floersch, J. E. & Townsend, L., Sep 1 2009, In : Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal. 26, 5, p. 447-466 20 p. 

Adolescent Experience of Psychotropic Treatment 
Floersch, J., Townsend, L., Longhofer, J., Munson, M., Winbush, V., Kranke, D., Faber, R., Thomas, J., Jenkins, J. H. & Findling, R. L., Mar 2009, In : transcultural psychiatry. 46, 1, p. 157-179 23 p. 

Natural mentoring and psychosocial outcomes among older youth transitioning from foster care 
Munson, M. R. & McMillen, J. C., Jan 1 2009, In : Children and Youth Services Review. 31, 1, p. 104-111 8 p. 

Satisfaction with counseling among black males in transition from the foster care system 
Scott, L. D., Munson, M. R. & White, T., Jan 1 2009, In : Children and Youth Services Review. 31, 1, p. 161-168 8 p. 

Nonkin natural mentors in the lives of older youths in foster care 
Munson, M. R. & McMillen, J. C., Oct 1 2008, In : Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research. 35, 4 SPEC. ISS., p. 454-468 15 p. 

Experiences of and attitudes toward mental health services among older youths in foster care 
Lee, B. R., Munson, M. R., Ware, N. C., Ollie, M. T., Scott, L. D. & McMillen, J. C., Apr 2006, In : Psychiatric Services. 57, 4, p. 487-492 6 p. 

Quality of care in the social services: Research agenda and methods 
McMillen, J. C., Proctor, E. K., Megivern, D., Striley, C. W., Cabassa, L. J., Munson, M. R. & Dickey, B., Sep 2005, In : Social Work Research. 29, 3, p. 181-191 11 p. 

The New York Times
Simple Steps for Managing Holiday Loneliness
December 20, 2022

The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring
An Interview with Dr. Michelle Munson
October 22, 2022

S.T.A.Y. Tuned Podcast
Tailoring Mental Health Treatments with Young Adult Voices
October 14, 2022

Futurity
Foster Teens Feel Unready to Manage Mental Health
April 21, 2020

Directed by Dr. Munson, the Youth and Young Adult Mental Health Group (YYAMH-G) is a group of invested partners dedicated to understanding the transition to adulthood among vulnerable populations of youth and young adults, and learning how to make the transition more successful for more young people. More specifically, the group draws on the expertise of individuals from across the United States to develop knowledge, practice approaches, and implementation strategies. The group utilizes mixed-method research, and all of its work is guided by the YYAMH-G Advisory Group.

Learn More

Just Do You is a brief meta-intervention for young adults experiencing one of their first-contacts with the adult mental health system. It was designed to help orient young people to their clinics, their programs, their providers, and typical mental health service components, while also encouraging them that they can be partners in their mental health care decisions.

Access program resources on the Just Do You website

MSW: Human Behavior in The Social Environment I

PhD: Social and Behavioral Intervention Research