About

Torrey A. Creed, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as the Director of the Beck Community Initiative at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and is a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Global Health. Dr. Creed is also the Founder and Director of the Penn Collaborative for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Implementation Science. His work focuses on the development, implementation, and dissemination of evidence-based mental health interventions, particularly in community and global health settings. He has contributed to research on artificial intelligence in psychotherapy, CBT training and implementation, and mental health service delivery, with a strong emphasis on translating scientific findings into practical tools for front-line staff supporting recovery and wellness.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Computer science
• Medicine

Selected publications

• CREATE Curated Article List

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-15

  other

  ***Click on the "Files" tab at the top to see papers, organized into folders by topic**** We will add publicly available papers and links to preprints for papers related to the USE of LLMs for mental health and implementation here.

  Publisher

• Training to understand and navigate emotions and interactions (TUNE In): A novel program to support social functioning in adults on the autism spectrum

  Research in Autism · 2026-01-12

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Public Mental Health Workers’ Policy Recommendations to Address the Behavioral Health Workforce Shortage

  Psychiatric Services · 2026-02-26

  article

  OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to elicit public mental health workers' recommendations for increasing the behavioral health workforce. METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 20 mental health workers in Philadelphia from September to October 2024. Thematic analysis was used to determine the most effective strategies for recruiting and retaining the behavioral health workforce. RESULTS: The workers supported various policy strategies to increase the workforce, such as employment and financial incentives, including sign-on bonuses and health care benefits. Workers noted that regarding current policies, updated information on federal loan forgiveness programs was challenging to find. They also emphasized that combining several policy strategies would effectively sustain the workforce. CONCLUSIONS: Comprehensive efforts are needed to adequately address the shortage of behavioral health workers in community settings. Workers championed a combination of several changes to increase the behavioral health workforce, with implications for mental health research, systems, and policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Prioritizing Partnerships in School-Based Implementation Research and Practice: Applying the ACCESS Model

  Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health · 2025-04-13

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Background: Schools are the primary context for mental health services for youth in the United States and a critical setting for increasing access to mental health care, especially for youth from low income and historically minoritized communities. However, numerous barriers to implementing evidence-based practices persist for chronically underserved youth in schools. Establishing strong collaborations with community partners is essential for successful implementation. Objective: This conceptual overview offers the ACCESS model as a resource for school-partnered training and consultation efforts, in contrast to previous applications that emphasized community mental health and inpatient contexts. Method: Drawing from our groups' collective decades of partnering with school and community members to deliver evidence-based practice training and consultation support in underserved schools and reflecting on our collaborations with community mental health agencies contracted to provide mental health services in schools, we outline a practical model for partners to provide training and implementation support in the school context. Specifically, we have described applications of the ACCESS model (Creed et al., 2014; Stirman et al., 2010) in training and consultation in partnership with leaders, service providers, and educators working in underserved school settings. The ACCESS model provides guidance for trainers and implementers to Assess and adapt training content, Convey the basics during initial training, provide Consultation to facilitate learning and behavior change, Evaluate work samples to assess EBP fidelity, Study outcomes, and foster Sustainment of practices over time. Conclusion: The ACCESS model offers a practical roadmap for school-partnered EBP implementation, outlining each step and providing concrete guidance for psychologists with applied examples from our work. This authorship team represents co-developers of the ACCESS model and three distinct research groups that have provided training and consultation in partnership with numerous public-school systems. Throughout, we emphasize how school-academic partnerships can support implementation in underserved schools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Training and Implementation: Comparisons Between Spanish-Speaking and English Monolingual Therapists

  International Journal of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy · 2025-06-12 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In response to a growing demand, therapists in the United States (U.S.) are increasingly providing mental health services in Spanish. However, little is known about therapists who provide Spanish-language services in the U.S. context, particularly in relation to training in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Thus, this study describes and explores differences between community therapists who provide services primarily in English or Spanish in regard to their demographic characteristics, evidence-based practice attitudes, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction, and CBT competence. We also longitudinally compared changes in therapist CBT competence across three time points. We analyzed data from 1497 therapists within a public mental health system, of whom 61 (4%) reported working with Spanish-speaking populations. Therapists were part of a 7-month CBT training and implementation program offered in both English and Spanish. We found that Spanish-speaking therapists were significantly older, had higher educational attainment, and had more years in their current role. Spanish-speaking therapists also had significantly lower pre-training secondary traumatic stress and CBT competence. There were no significant cross-sectional differences in EBP attitudes, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Longitudinally, Spanish-speaking therapists showed greater gains in CBT competence from pre-training to 3 months and from pre-training to certification. By the end of training, therapists in both groups demonstrated strong CBT competence, regardless of their primary language. Current findings provide initial evidence that constructs underlying CBT can serve as a bridge to providing services to Spanish-speaking groups, for whom CBT was not originally developed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Predictors of skill trajectories in the implementation of cognitive behavioral therapy

  Implementation Science Communications · 2025-09-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  BACKGROUND: Evidence based practices such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are often underutilized in community mental health settings. Implementation efforts can be effective in increasing CBT use among clinicians, but not all therapists successfully reach CBT competence at the end of training. Past studies have focused on how clinicians overall acquire CBT skills, rather than examining different learning trajectories that clinicians may follow and predictors of those trajectories; however, understanding of learning trajectories may suggest targets for implementation strategies. METHODS: We used growth mixture models to identity trajectories in CBT skill acquisition among clinicians (n = 812) participating in a large scale CBT training and implementation program, and examined predictors (attitudes towards EBPs, clinician burnout, professional field, educational degree level) of trajectory membership. We assessed model fit using BIC, Vuong likelihood tests, and entropy. We hypothesized that there would be at least two trajectories- one where clinicians increased in skills over time and reach CBT competence, and one with minimal increases in CBT skills that did not result in competence. We hypothesized that presence of a graduate degree, more positive attitudes towards EBPs, and lower burnout would predict more positive trajectories in CBT skill acquisition. We did not have a specific prediction for field of study and CBT skill acquisition. RESULTS: Clinicians followed either a progressive trajectory with steady increases in CBT skills over time, or a stagnant trajectory with minimal increases in CBT skills. Clinicians with more positive attitudes towards EBPs were 3.51 times more likely to follow a progressive trajectory, while clinicians who were in an 'Other' professional field were 0.46 times less likely to follow a progressive trajectory. Contrary to our hypotheses, educational degree and clinician burnout did not predict CBT trajectories. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that attitudes towards EBPs can be an important intervention point to improve CBT skill acquisition for therapists in training and implementation efforts. More structured support for clinicians who did not receive training in mental health focused fields may also help improve CBT learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethical considerations and practical suggestions for CBT consultation in mental health implementation research and practice

  Cognitive Behaviour Therapy · 2025-06-04 · 1 citations

  review

  Implementation efforts to increase delivery of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) require ongoing consultation to support the necessary skill development, intervention delivery, and sustainability of its practice in the face of common barriers. However, many ethical challenges can arise within consultation across implementation research and practice at both an individual and organizational level that are not easily resolved within current ethical guidelines. In this paper, we highlight the role of consultation in implementation science and practice and illustrate major ethical challenges that can arise in CBT consultation (i.e. role clarity, influence and power dynamics, professional differences, legal requirements), providing relevant case examples. We then offer practical suggestions for consultants to effectively and proactively address ethically challenging situations, guided by a structured problem-solving framework with reflective questions. We present an extended case example to demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework to support clinicians-particularly practitioners engaged in training and consultation-to support delivery of high-quality, evidence-based care. We conclude by discussing important future directions as they relate to ethical consultation practices to advance CBT implementation.

  PublisherDOI

• A Framework for Automation in Psychotherapy

  Current Directions in Psychological Science · 2025-11-07

  articleOpen access

  Psychotherapy is a conversational intervention that has relied on humans to manage its implementation. Improvements in conversational artificial intelligence (AI) have accompanied speculation on how technologies might automate components of psychotherapy, most often the replacement of human therapists. However, there is a spectrum of opportunities for human collaboration with autonomous systems in psychotherapy, including evaluation, documentation, training, and assistance. Clarity about what is being automated is necessary to understand the affordances and limitations of specific technologies. As a guidepost for empirical and ethical inquiry, we present a framework for categories of autonomous systems in psychotherapy. Categories include scripted or rule-based conversations, collaborative systems where humans are evaluated by, supervise, or are assisted by AI, and agents that generate interventions. These categories highlight considerations for key stakeholders as psychotherapy moves from unmediated human-to-human conversation to various forms of automation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From innovation to implementation: Artificial intelligence in cognitive behaviour therapy training and supervision

  Behaviour Research and Therapy · 2025-12-31

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Training to Understand and Navigate Emotions and Interactions (Tune in): A Novel Program to Support Social Functioning in Adults on the Autism Spectrum

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Technology-supported training and quality assurance for psychosocial interventions

  NIH · $832k · 2019–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Shannon Wiltsey Stirman

  National Center for PTSD

  49 shared

• Aaron T. Beck

  40 shared

• Arthur C. Evans

  36 shared

• Sarah A. Frankel

  Columbia University Irving Medical Center

  18 shared

• Paul Crits‐Christoph

  University of Pennsylvania

  18 shared

• Regina Xhezo

  17 shared

• Matthew O. Hurford

  UPMC Center for High Value Health Care

  17 shared

• Abby Adler

  17 shared

Awards & honors

• Director, Beck Community Initiative, Perelman School of Medi…
• Scholar, University of Pennsylvania Center for Global Health
• Founder and Director, Penn Collaborative for CBT and Impleme…
• Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics,…