Child Mental Health ─ Exploring Systems of Care in the New Millennium

Use these system-of-care concepts to better serve children with serious emotional problems and their families!

Providing services to children with emotional problems and their families continues to be a major challenge for social workers, family therapists, child mental health advocates, and psychologists in the new century. This valuable book addresses that challenge, detailing theory, principles, and application issues from the vantage points of both consumers and service providers. System-of-care values and practices were developed to address these concerns and meet the needs of these children and families, who tend to receive either no services at all or services that are far too restrictive, at a large cost to the organization providing the services.

Child Mental Health: Exploring Systems of Care in the New Millennium identifies salient issues and offers suggestions for addressing the complexities of providing services for these troubled families. It also provides hope and encouragement for family members and professionals by identifying roles and practices that are effective in building collaborative community-based services.

This book takes an incisive look at:

• the benefits and difficulties of partnering between practitioners and families
• the need for and benefits of partnering between practitioners of various disciplines within the system of care
• a working model of a wraparound process (the hallmark of the system of care)
• barriers that prevent effective wraparound services and what causes them
• the need to help social workers learn parent partnering skills
• the roles that families can play in the system of care
• the need for specialized training so that practitioners can learn to assess, understand, and integrate a family's spiritual beliefs into the system of care
• the development of an interdisciplinary, collaborative practice course at East Carolina University
• experiential training and shared-classroom experiences for students

Child Mental Health: Exploring Systems of Care in the New Millennium is a tool that will aid practitioners and consumers alike as they shift their point of view from the provider-as-expert paradigm to one of building partnerships.