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.

This volume is the product of a combined effort to find programs of service delivery that demonstrably treat the varieties of mental health problems of children and their families. The Section on Clinical Child Psychology (APA, Clinical Psychology Section I) and the Division of Child, Youth, and Family Services (APA, Division 37) established a task force whose mission was to identify, provide recognition for, and disseminate information on such programs. Their findings are presented here. The opening chapter and each section overview chapter provide orientations to the program descriptions and examine characteristics of exemplary interventions. The targeted problems include: child abuse and neglect, school adjustment problems, social problem-solving problems, autism and developmental disabilities, conduct disorders and severe emotional problems, children affected by disasters and trauma, children whose parents are divorced, children of teenage parents, family dysfunction and parent-child relationships, oppositional defiant disorder, and attention deficit disorder. Settings for interventions in the model programs include: schools, mental health centers and family guidance clinics, hospitals and pediatric practices, group homes and sheltered workshops, community centers, family homes, summer camps, and coordinated systems of care. The 18 programs described demonstrate the rationale for their interventions, their targeted populations, the type of staff and personnel, various programmatic interventions, aspects of the problems, implementation of interventions, and how the programs have been evaluated. The needs for improved mental health services remain strong. The supporting organizations and the members of the Task Force intend for the product of this project to be helpful in providing models for meeting those needs.

This volume is the product of a combined effort to find programs of service delivery that demonstrably treat the varieties of mental health problems of children and their families. The Section on Clinical Child Psychology (APA, Clinical Psychology Section I) and the Division of Child, Youth, and Family Services (APA, Division 37) established a task force whose mission was to identify, provide recognition for, and disseminate information on such programs. Their findings are presented here. The opening chapter and each section overview chapter provide orientations to the program descriptions and examine characteristics of exemplary interventions. The targeted problems include: child abuse and neglect, school adjustment problems, social problem-solving problems, autism and developmental disabilities, conduct disorders and severe emotional problems, children affected by disasters and trauma, children whose parents are divorced, children of teenage parents, family dysfunction and parent-child relationships, oppositional defiant disorder, and attention deficit disorder. Settings for interventions in the model programs include: schools, mental health centers and family guidance clinics, hospitals and pediatric practices, group homes and sheltered workshops, community centers, family homes, summer camps, and coordinated systems of care. The 18 programs described demonstrate the rationale for their interventions, their targeted populations, the type of staff and personnel, various programmatic interventions, aspects of the problems, implementation of interventions, and how the programs have been evaluated. The needs for improved mental health services remain strong. The supporting organizations and the members of the Task Force intend for the product of this project to be helpful in providing models for meeting those needs.

Address the urgent need for individualized, coordinated mental health care with this book--the only one-stop reference for establishing, evaluating, and improving services and systems of care for children and adolescents with mental health challenges and their families. The new cornerstone of the highly respected Systems of Care for Children's Mental Health series, this comprehensive volume helps administrators, program developers, and clinicians from mental health and partner child-serving systems skillfully navigate every key issue they may encounter on the road to effective service delivery. Weaving all the latest research and best practices into a single accessible handbook, more than 60 expert contributors give readers the in-depth, practical knowledge they need to develop comprehensive, community-based, coordinated systems of care for youth with mental health challenges and their families avoid duplication and fragmentation of services across mental health and other child-serving systems develop individualized care plans for children with complex needs and implement the "wraparound" approach to service delivery incorporate evidence-based practices into systems of care use smart financing strategies that make the most of multiple funding streams ensure the full participation of families and youth in service planning and delivery improve services and care coordination across a variety of systems--schools, child welfare, juvenile justice work effectively with youth and families from diverse backgrounds and communities conduct accurate program evaluation and continuous quality improvement use the best professional development strategies to ensure a skilled and dedicated workforce Throughout the book, extended case studies of children, youth, families, and successful programs take readers beyond the abstract and reveal in vivid detail how high-quality services can transform the lives of children and youth--from early childhood to their transition to adulthood--as well as their families and caregivers. A must-own compendium of knowledge for anyone involved in shaping the future of mental health services, this book is the new blueprint for systems of care that truly respond to the needs of children, youth and families. Learn more about the Systems of Care for Children's Mental Health series.

Social, economic, and theoretical changes in the current clinical landscape are adding up to profound changes in children’s services--not the least of which is an expanded need for mental health services. Professionals--novices and veteran clinicians alike--wonder how to fill this demand in the present climate of turf wars, reorganizations, and budget cuts. The Handbook of Mental Health Services for Children, Adolescents, and Families cogently analyzes the issues and provides the answers, from current issues and emerging therapeutic trends to new avenues of treatment. Thoroughly researches and documented buy industry experts, it presents the widest range of mental health services available to youth and their families. Areas of coverage include: Specific modalities in service delivery, including in-patient and day treatment facilities, pediatric hospitals, and community mental health centers as well as rural, school, and primary care settings. Services tailored to special populations, such as adolescent sex offenders, homeless children and their families, children with chronic illness, oppositional teens, abuse situations, and children exposed to traumatic events. Details on preventative programs for child abuse, substance abuse, STD’s, and gang violence. An in-depth examination of the latest developments in children’s services, including therapeutic camping and Internet-based treatment. Approaches and methods for evaluating service organization, delivery, and efficacy. Few areas of mental health care demonstrate the need for complementary services as much as child and family practice does. With this need firmly in mind, the Handbook encourages creativity and collaboration within practice settings and across agencies. For clinicians, administrators, school practitioners, and advanced-level students, this is a reference certain to have lasting impact on the field.

In recent years the escalating costs of health care have caused managed care programs to shift the delivery of pediatric psychological services away from specialized medical centers and into primary care and school settings. One result has been a radical expansion of school psychology into issues of clinical intervention, health promotion, and the assessment of psychotropic medications. School psychologists are now expected to either deliver or (more likely) to provide consultation regarding a wide variety of pediatric psychological services. Because this is a recent phenomenon, very few school-based psychologists or allied health practitioners (school counselors and social workers) have received training in pediatric psychology. The mission of this book is to provide them with a comprehensive and authoritative guide to their newly acquired responsibilities in such areas as psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, health promotion, and prevention of disease. This book is appropriate for anyone concerned with issues of pediatric psychology in school settings: school psychologists, pediatric psychologists, clinical child psychologists, as well as pediatricians and child psychiatrists.

This reader compares up-to-date policy and research evidence from the UK and USA on the effectiveness of core child welfare interventions. The text shows how knowledge of effective interventions can be used to improve assessment of needs, and planning and reviewing services to children and their families.