The ecological perspective is a contextual approach which works at the interface between families and the broader ecology or ecosystem of the child; the approach is not new but has not been widely adopted due to the lack of illustrative material available for practitioners. Through an approach more descriptive and explanatory than empirical, the author shows the clinician (or other child care professional) why the child's environment is crucial and provides techniques to draw people in the child's environment into the healing process.

Use a strengths perspective for working with your younger clients! Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model presents new insights into successfully working with children by concentrating on their capabilities and resilience. This book explores the continuum of children’s needs and challenges from early childhood through adolescence. This text also supports child-centered and strengths-oriented approaches to intervention with children and introduces specific strategies for maximizing pro-social behaviors, self-concept, learning, and positive peer relationships in children at home, at school, and in the community. Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth shows how children’s rights have slowly evolved over many years, from children’s status as property in the 1600s to the twentieth-century innovations that give a child a specific legal status with a certain amount of freedom and self-determination. By emphasizing the self-concept and self-esteem guidelines outlined by this book, social workers, mental health specialists, and childcare professionals can help children transition into healthy adults, despite hardships, disabilities, or parent negligence. Chapters highlighting interview and assessment techniques as well as media-directed, creative child therapies will enhance your counseling and intervention practices. Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth provides you with insight on: the relationships between children and family environmentfrom two-parent families to foster families child socialization and peer relationshipsin school and around the community adolescencegender roles, ethnic and racial diversity, sexual orientation, and adult transitioning educational needsteacher expectations, special education, diversity, home schooling and more! The strengths perspective is not always included in traditional child welfare and children’s practice texts, and this textbook fills that gap for working with younger clients. Children in child welfare, educational, mental health, family service, and recreational settings will all benefit from the inclusion of Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model in your work. Augmented with case scenarios and studies, empirical findings, and questions for discussion in every chapter, this book will help child service professionals as well as university faculty and students.

Pardeck demonstrates that the ecological approach to social work practice stresses effective intervention, and that effective intervention occurs through not only working with individuals, but also with the familial, social, and cultural factors that impact their social functioning. The power of the ecological approach, through focusing on multiple factors for assessment and intervention, is that it integrates empirically based theories from various fields including social work, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Pardeck provides an orientation to the role of social work practitioners within the human services. He differentiates the unique contributions of social work and explains them in terms of the needs and goals of an ecological approach to practice. An ecological approach to practice stresses that effective social work intervention occurs through not only working with individuals, but also with the familial, social, and cultural factors that impact their social functioning. The power of the ecological approach, through focusing on multiple factors for assessment and intervention, is that it integrates empirically based theories from various fields including social work, psychology, and anthropology. The book represents an effort to define the goals, commitments, and approaches that have emerged out of the history of social work and to relate them to similar concepts and values that are central to an ecological approach to practice. Three pervasive and unifying themes run through the book. One is the constant commitment to goals of facilitating human development. Pardeck suggests this is a central ethic that defines and distinguishes an ecological approach to social work practice. The second theme is an affirmation of the basic utility of a systems approach in conceptualizing and intervening in human needs, concerns, and problems. The ecological perspective views human beings as social organisms engaged in patterns of relationships that nurture or inhibit this basic humanity. The third theme is an interactionist view of the importance of person-environment fit as a central dynamic in human functioning. The traditional intra-psychic aspects of human behavior have tended to obscure the immense importance of both nurturing and potentially damaging forces at work in the social environment. This volume will be of considerable interest to social work educators and practitioners as well as their research libraries.

Thomas J. Dishion and Elizabeth A. Stormshak describe their family-centered, ecological approach, which engages children, adolescents, and their families; may be used as a periodic preventive checkup and as a more intensive intervention; and may be delivered in community settings such as schools in order to have the greatest public health impact. The authors demonstrate how they examine psychopathology in children and adolescents in the context of the ecology (families, peer groups, communities, and schools) in which they live. They present their empirically derived approach and illustrate how developmentally and culturally relevant interventions are shaped. An ecological approach works within a health maintenance teamwork.

In recent years, mental health professionals who have traditionally focused on the emotional state of the individual have come to realize that problems arise from the unique interactions between particular individuals and environments. From necessity, they are beginning to look at context; no longer can they place the responsibility for mental health on the shoulders of the person alone. Most attention has been paid to the impact of educational and work settings, but it is clear that all life settings contribute meaningfully to positive psychological adaptation and must be considered in any attempt to understand a person's difficulties. This book explores the crucial ramifications of new theory and research in person-environment psychology for assessment and intervention. All practitioners seeking to deliver effective mental health services to adolescents and adults will learn from it.

Innovative Approaches for Difficult-to-Treat Populations makes recommendations for developing and disseminating innovative mental health services. It is geared toward clinicians, administrators, and policy-makers struggling to develop both clinically effective and cost-effective mental health and substance abuse services, and it focuses on services for individuals who use the highest proportion of mental health resources and for whom traditional services have not been effective. These target populations include youth with serious behavioral and emotional disturbances and adults with severe and persistent mental illnesses. The innovative approaches reviewed include diverse treatment methods for differing clinical populations. These varied approaches have several common elements: * Social-ecological theory frameworks* An emphasis on delivering flexible, comprehensive, pragmatic, and goal-oriented interventions in persons' natural environments* Increased accountability on the part of service providers* The transition from centralized to community-based care is discussed, and normalizing a patient's daily routine as an important factor in the success of state-of-the-art community support programs is emphasized Innovative Approaches for Difficult-to-Treat Populations offers mental health professionals and students a firsthand look at the future direction of clinical services. Policy issues necessary to developing and disseminating progressive treatments are addressed, including the downsizing of state psychiatric hospitals, strategies for reforming state mental hospital systems, and ethical issues in research on child and adolescent mental disorders.