Emerging Practice

BRIGHT Intervention (Building Resilience through Intervention: Growing Healthier Together)

State/Jurisdiction: Massachusetts
Setting: Clinical Home
Population: Children Infant Women & Maternal
Topic Area: Safe and Connected Communities Mental Health & Substance Use Injury Prevention & Hospitalization
NPMs: NPM 5: Safe Sleep NPM 7.1: Injury Hospitalization – Ages 0 to 9

The US opioid epidemic has become increasingly more complicated and deadly (AMA, 2021). Therefore, intervention needs of pregnant and parenting women with substance or opioid use disorder (SUD/OUD) are more urgent, particularly given the challenges of the COVID-19 global pandemic. BRIGHT (Building Resilience through Intervention: Growing Healthier Together) is an intervention addressing the unique dyadic needs of the maternal-child relationship, maternal mental health, and parenting capacity, while promoting healthy child development. Over the past 10 years, BRIGHT has been offered within substance use treatment, a prenatal clinic, and in the home. Rooted in the principles of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (Lieberman, Ghosh Ippen & Van Horn, 2015) and attachment-informed parenting interventions for mothers with SUDs (Suchman, et al., 2013), the strength-based, attachment-focused BRIGHT intervention includes mother-child dyadic techniques to improve maternal reflective functioning, mother-child attachment, and child social-emotional development and reduce child maltreatment. BRIGHT encourages parental attunement and reflective functioning, play and relationship activities between parent and child, emotion regulation, and recovery maintenance. With Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funding from 2009 through today, the Institute for Health and Recovery, Jewish Family and Children’s Service (2009-2016) and Boston University School of Social Work have offered BRIGHT as an enhancement to addiction treatment. Promising evaluation findings demonstrated that the intervention improves parenting capacities and maternal mental health (Paris, et al., 2015).


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Implementation Handout



CONTACT INFORMATION
Boston University
Ruth Paris
rparis@bu.edu
(617) 353-7717
Practice Website