Health and Mental Health

This book presents an approach to therapeutic contact with clients that capitalizes on people's resilience, strengths, and capacities. The helper works in collaboration with the individual to identify and amplify these capacities to resolve problems and improve quality of life. Clients are empowered to find their own answers and solutions that will fit their particular worldview and their unique strengths (De Jong & Miller, 1995). These principles are operationalized through solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing. The helper also identifies areas in which clients can use education on how to meet more effectively life's challenges. A focus on coping skills is represented by cognitive-behavioral therapy. These theoretical approaches are woven together for the purpose of maximizing a person's ability to enhance the strengths they bring and also learn new skills that can help them. The resultant strengths- and skills-building model is applied, throughout the book, to various problems and populations that helping practitioners may encounter.

The landmark National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) study represents the first effort to gather nationally representative data, based on first-hand reports, about the well-being of children and families who encounter the child welfare system. NSCAW's findings offer an unprecedented national source of data that describe the developmental status and functional characteristics of children who come to the attention of child protective services. Much more than a simple history of placements or length of stay in foster care, NSCAW data chart the trajectory of families across service pathways for a multi-dimensional view of their specific needs. The NSCAW survey is longitudinal, contains direct assessments and reports about each child from multiple sources, and is designed to address questions of relations among children's characteristics and experiences, their development, their pathways through the child welfare service system, their service needs, their service receipt, and ultimately, their well-being over time. The topics covered in this book are key to child welfare practice and policy, but are also of compelling interest to other child service sectors such as health, mental health, education, and juvenile justice. The authors of chapters in this volume are esteemed researchers within psychology, social work, economics, and public health. Together they represent the future of child welfare research, showcasing the potential of NSCAW as a valuable resource to the research community, and providing glimpses of how the data can be used to inform practice and policy.

This book reviews the evidence-based treatments relevant to family treatment in human services and social services settings. It addresses some of the main reasons families are seen in mental health and social service settings: child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct problems, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, depression, and dementia. For each problem area, a detailed case study provides step-by-step guidelines on how the evidence-based theory can be applied in practice. Interventions include psychoeducation, behavioral parent training, solution-focused therapy, cognitive-behavioral treatment, structural family therapy, and multisystemic treatment.

This is a book about how people change their minds and how mental health practitioners can help this process along. It addresses a gap in the literature on cognitive therapy that results from an almost exclusive focus on the constructed aspects of personal meaning, and a lack of attention to the ways in which information that we pick up from life circumstances also influences what we know, feel, and do. Conceptions that ignore the role that current life conditions and interpersonal events play in creating or revising meanings limit the utility of cognitive therapy approaches for clients whose lives are marked by ongoing deprivation, threat, and vulnerability. In laying out a broader perspective, a Cognitive-Integrative perspective, the book expands the internal focus of traditional cognitive therapies to take more account of the role of information generated by environmental events and conditions in impeding or promoting change. It contends that mind draws on organized memories of previous experiences as well as currently available information to generate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. The theoretical grounding for this perspective is drawn from a range of cognitive, neurological, social, psychological, and social work theories. Theoretical explanations are laid out. They are balanced with practice guidelines and grounded in an offering of clinical examples.

This book presents innovative interventions for youth with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. The book is designed to fill a gap between the knowledge base and clinical practice through its presentation of theory, practice parameters, training requirements, and research evidence. Featuring community-based and state-of-the-art services for youth with severe emotional and behavioral disorders and their families, this book describes each intervention in depth, along with the supporting evidence for its utility. Most chapters present a single intervention as an alternative to institutional care. Shared characteristics of these interventions include delivery of services in the community (homes, schools, and neighborhoods) provided largely by parents and paraprofessional staff. The interventions are appropriate to use in any of the child human services sectors and have been developed in the field with real-world child and family clients. In addition, they offer a reduced cost in comparison to institutional care. Several chapters address diagnostic-specific psychosocial and psychopharmacological treatments, which are likely to be provided as adjunctive treatment in a clinical setting.

This book describes what happens to human service delivery programs under the impact of unrelenting stress and multiple losses. Never perfect places of safety in the first place, many social services of every size, shape, and variety are collapsing under over thirty years of system fragmentation even while public costs have escalated dramatically. The result is that important places of refuge–of sanctuary–for the children, adults, and families who have been exposed to the greatest amount of adversity and trauma, are struggling to provide even the most minimally adequate services. We believe that at this point, our social service network is functioning as a trauma-organized system still largely unaware of the multiple ways in which adaptation to chronic stress has created a state of dysfunction that in many cases virtually prohibits the recovery of the individual clients who are the source of the underlying and original organizational missions, while damaging many of the people who work within it. Just as the encroachment of trauma into the life of an individual client is an insidious process that turns the past into a nightmare, the present into a repetitive cycle of re-enactment, and the future into a terminal illness, the impact of chronic strain on an organization is insidious. As seemingly logical reactions to difficult situations pile upon each other, no one is able to truly perceive the fundamentally skewed and post-traumatic basic assumptions upon which that logic is built. As an earthquake can cause the foundations of a building to become unstable, even while the building still stands, apparently intact, so too does chronic repetitive stress or sudden traumatic stress destabilize the cognitive and affective foundations of shared meaning that is necessary for a group to function and stay whole. The goal of this book is a practical one: to provide the beginnings of a coherent framework for organizational staff and leaders to more effectively provide trauma-informed care for their clients by becoming trauma-sensitive themselves. This means becoming sensitive to the ways in which all human beings and human systems are impacted by individual and collective exposure to overwhelming stress.

The purpose of this book is to examine the opportunities for, and limitations to, empowerment among adults with severe mental illness who, historically, have lacked power and have been the focus of stigma and discrimination. Its central premise is that despite significant limitations to empowerment, people with severe mental illness can be empowered when certain conditions are met. Building on the work of Joel F. Handler, nine conditions are outlined under which empowerment is likely to occur and be sustained long-term. These conditions are then applied to determine the circumstances under which people with severe mental illness can be empowered through participation in each of seven activities. These including treatment planning; the selection and control of housing; decision making in the organizations from which services are received; planning and policy making; securing and maintaining employment that produces a liveable wage; research and evaluation; and service provision to other people with mental illness. Case studies from a public psychiatric hospital and a community mental health agency illustrate each of the seven areas. Finally, the book identifies the roles that service providers, administrators, policy makers, advocacy groups, researchers, and clients can play in the empowerment process.

This book gives an overview of family psychoeducation as an evidence-based psychosocial treatment for schizophrenia and other major psychiatric disorders. Family psychoeducation has produced a robust body of research indicating significant, sustained reductions in patients' relapse and rehospitalization rates and improvements in families' wellbeing. Converging with historical changes in mental health systems, the empirical findings and new theoretical approaches that produced this treatment modality are described. Responsive to research data and expressed informational needs of families of persons with severe mental illness, psychoeducational models were developed by major research centers in the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries, and in China. The book presents theoretical premises and a research overview, together with descriptions of model programs and long-range outcomes. Psychoeducation for prodromal, first-episode, and child and adolescents interventions are discussed as well as for diverse diagnoses and special populations. Cross-cultural and international studies are presented, with a focus on uniformities and cultural variations. Briefer versions of family education, now widely utilized, are then discussed, including research findings of efficacy. Generic components are presented together with a discussion of variations. Training models and issues, and required competencies, are presented. Contemporary applications of family psychoeducation in American and European mental health systems are described, with research on barriers to implementation and suggested solutions. A critical assessment of unresolved issues is followed by a discussion of future trends in families' involvement in the treatment process. An Appendix provides information on family organizations and other selected resources for families in various countries throughout the world, as well as useful materials for service providers.

This volume builds the bridge between books on community practice and on clinical practice, including 33 chapters written by social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists, for clinicians making the transition to community-based work. This is the first handbook to address this gap and provide guidance for today's community practitioners. Its overarching goal is to support the ongoing development of community-based mental health care, drawing on practical examples. This collection outlines the history and philosophy of community practice, and also illustrates the state of the art, with examples from early intervention and development programs, school-based practice, and community mental health services for children, families, and adults.

The fields of health care, aging, and social work are often treated as discrete entities, while all social workers deal with issues of health and aging on a daily basis, regardless of practice specialization. This is the first reference book to address this reality by compiling the most current thinking on these subjects in a single volume. With the population of older adults increasing as rapidly as new possibilities for their care, professionals need an accessible source of specialized information about how best to serve the elderly and their families. The most experienced and prominent gerontological health care scholars provide social workers with up-to-date knowledge of evidence-based practice guidelines for effectively assessing and treating older adults and supporting their families. The contributing authors paint portraits of a variety of populations that social workers serve and arenas in which they practice, followed by detailed recommendations of best practices for an array of physical and mental health conditions.