This popular manual presents an empirically tested format and ready-made curricula for skills training groups in a range of settings. Part I takes therapists and counselors step by step through assessing clients' existing skills, teaching new skills, and managing common treatment challenges. Part II comprises over 60 ready-to-photocopy skill sheets. Each sheet--essentially a complete lesson plan--explains the rationale for the skill at hand, breaks it down into smaller steps, suggests role-play scenarios, and highlights special considerations. Of special value for practitioners, the 8 1/2" x 11" format makes it easy to reproduce and use the practical materials in the book.

This work is truly a guidebook-succinct, concrete, clearly written, and unambiguously specific. Based upon learning principles, the text naturally presents a linear and hierarchical exposition. The reader is never in doubt about what steps should follow what step. Each topic is broken down into readily assimilable components.

"Social skills training (SST) continues to be a widely accepted and recommended intervention for improving the psychosocial functioning of persons with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. The book begins by providing useful background information, including the nature and importance of social skills (Chapter 1), updated evidence supporting the effectiveness of SST (Chapter 2), and assessment and goal-setting for SST (Chapter 3). The next group of chapters addresses the practicalities of providing SST groups and are also similar to the second edition, including methods for teaching social skills (Chapter 4), starting an SST group (Chapter 5), choosing curricula for an SST group (Chapter 6), tailoring SST to meet individual participant needs (Chapter 7), and solutions to common challenges encountered when providing SST (Chapter 8). The third edition of this book differs from the second edition in the variety of special topics related to SST that are addressed. While the second edition had only one such chapter on providing SST to individuals with comorbid substance use problems, in addition to retaining (and updating) this chapter (Chapter 9), the third edition also has six additional chapters on special topics, including younger individuals who are either at risk for psychosis or recovering from a first episode of psychosis (Chapter 10), technology-based communication skills (Chapter 11), SST with older individuals (Chapter 12), providing SST in residential or inpatient settings (Chapter 13), cultural factors when providing SST (Chapter 14), and gender and sexual identity issues and sexual harassment (Chapter 15)"--

Research and experience show that children and adolescents who struggle with emotional, behavioral and social problems do improve when they learn prosocial skills. Social skill instruction, therefore, can be a vital component in the treatment planning for a child diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Teaching Social Skills to Youth with Mental Health Disorders is a guide for therapists, counselors, psychologists, educators, and other practitioners trying to help these youth get better.

Originally published in 1984, one of the few facts that emerged clearly in the beleaguered field of psychology and mental health at the time was the extent of poor social skills in psychiatric patients, the mentally handicapped and problem adolescents. As a result, during the 1970s, social skills training – espoused as a form of behaviour therapy – seemed to offer great promise, based on the notion that social skills, like any other skills, are learnt and can be taught if lacking. However, in evaluating social skills training, many investigators found that skills did not endure and generalise. This book attempts a major re-assessment of social skills training. It examines the underlying paradigms, which are shown to be fundamentally behaviourist. Such paradigms, it is argued, severely constrain the aims and method of current types of training. Thus the book develops what is termed an ‘agency’ approach, based on man as a social agent who actively constructs his own experiences and generates his own goal-directed behaviour on the basis of those constructs. This new model is developed in both theoretical and practical ways in the main body of the book and should, even today, be of great interest to all those involved with social skills training.

This unique manual presents cognitive-behavioral social skills training (CBSST), a step-by-step, empirically supported intervention that helps clients with schizophrenia achieve recovery goals related to living, learning, working, and socializing. CBSST interweaves three evidence-based practices--cognitive-behavioral therapy, social skills training, and problem-solving training--and can be delivered in individual or group contexts. Highly user friendly, the manual includes provider scripts, teaching tools, and engaging exercises and activities. Reproducible consumer workbooks for each module include skills summaries and worksheets. The large-size format facilitates photocopying; purchasers also get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials. Listed in SAMHSA's National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices