Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

Further Readings

Bonnie, R., & Monahan, J. (2005). From coercion to

contract: Reframing the debate on mandated community

treatment for people with mental disorders. Law and

Human Behavior, 29,487–505.

Monahan, J., Bonnie, R., Appelbaum, P., Hyde, P., Steadman,

H., & Swartz, M. (2001). Mandated community

treatment: Beyond outpatient commitment. Psychiatric

Services, 52,1198–1205.

Monahan, J., Redlich, A., Swanson, J., Robbins, P.,

Appelbaum, P., Petrila, J., et al. (2005). Use of leverage to

improve adherence to psychiatric treatment in the

community. Psychiatric Services, 56,37–44.

Monahan, J., Swartz, M., & Bonnie, R. (2003). Mandated

treatment in the community for people with mental

disorders. Health Affairs, 22,28–38.

MASSACHUSETTSYOUTH

SCREENINGINSTRUMENT–

VERSION2 (MAYSI–2)

The Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument–

Version 2 (MAYSI–2) is a brief,self-report screening

tool designed to identify youths with special mental

health needs in the juvenile justice system. It is not a

diagnostic tool. Instead, it identifies emergent risks of

youths in need of a comprehensive psychological

assessment. The developers of the MAYSI–2 designed

it for administration by nonclinicians and normed it for

use with youths aged 12 to 17 years on entry into one

of three different settings in the juvenile justice sys-

tem—intake probation, pretrial detention, and postsen-

tencing correctional facilities. It is one of the only true

mental health “screening” tools (as opposed to assess-

ment tools) developed for juvenile justice settings. As

such, the MAYSI–2 is important for juvenile justice

administrators who have an obligation to manage the

serious mental health needs of youths in their care by,

among other procedures, implementing mental health

screening. At the time of writing this entry, the

MAYSI–2 was being used statewide by juvenile justice

agencies in more than 35 states.

Description and Administration

The MAYSI–2 is a 52-item, “yes/no” screening tool

on which youths report the presence or absence of

symptoms or behaviors related to several areas of

emotional, behavioral, and psychological disturbances

experienced “within the past few months.” The test

can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes and is generally

administered by frontline, nonclinical staff via a voice

computer program (MAYSIWARE) or a paper-and-

pencil test, both of which are available in English and

Spanish. The MAYSI–2 is self-administered (youths

read the questions and circle their answers) unless

youths have reading difficulties and the voice com-

puter program is not an option. In these cases, staff

should read questions to the youths and allow them to

circle their own answers. The pencil-and-paper and

voice computer modes of administration appear to

yield comparable MAYSI–2 scores.

The 52 items produce scores on six clinical scales—

Alcohol/Drug Use (ADU), Angry/Irritable (AI),

Depressed/Anxious (DA), Somatic Complaints (SC),

Suicide Ideation (SI), and Thought Disturbance (TD;

for boys only)—and one nonclinical scale—Traumatic

Experiences (TE), which screens for reported exposure

to potentially traumatic events. Scale scores are gener-

ated from simple sums of the items, which range from

5 to 9 items depending on the scale. The TD scale is for

boys only because factor analyses could not derive a

coherent TD scale for girls, and the item content of the

TE scale differs for boys and girls.

Each of the six clinical scales has a “Caution” cut-

off to signal a “clinically significant” elevation and a

“Warning” cutoff, which was based on the scores sep-

arating the upper 10% of youths in the development

sample. The constellation of Caution and Warning

cutoffs, which should signal a response for a particu-

lar youth (i.e., decision-making rules), was not pre-

scribed by the MAYSI–2 developers. Instead, these

decisions are left to the discretion of the juvenile jus-

tice site based on their resources and needs to respond

to youths in their care.

Development and Factor Structure

The MAYSI–2 was created by Thomas Grisso and

Richard Barnum, who selected a pool of items related

to mental disorders, emotional disturbances, and

behavioral problems common to adolescents. The

final 52 items were generated from pilot testing on a

small sample of youths. The developers identified the

seven MAYSI–2 scales from factor analyses per-

formed on data from 1,279 juvenile-justice-involved

youths in Massachusetts. They derived Caution cutoff

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