Clinical Mental Health Counseling - Child and Adolescent Track

Diagnosis and Treatment of Children and Adolescents: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals is a resource tailored to the particular needs of current and future counselors, behavioral healthcare clinicians, and other helping professionals working with this vulnerable population. With in-depth content broken into two sections, this book first provides a foundation in the diagnostic process by covering the underlying principles of diagnosis and treatment planning, and then applies this framework to the DSM-5 categories related to children and adolescents. With research continually reshaping our understanding of mental health, it is critical mental health professionals make decisions based on evidence-based pathways that include the specialized research around children and adolescents. The leading experts who contributed to this book share contemporary perspectives on developmental considerations, assessment information, presenting symptoms, comorbidity, levels of severity, prevalence data, and other relevant factors. Structured content of chapters provides a crosswalk between the DSM-5 and this book. Updated content based upon the changes, additions, and revisions to the DSM-5 that affect diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. Pedagogical features, such as learning objectives, case studies, guided practice exercises, and additional resources, to support effective learning. Diagnosis and Treatment of Children and Adolescents: A Guide for Clinical and School Settings is a critical resource for mental health practitioners and graduate students working toward a career in a mental health profession.

This book builds on an individualized, integrated approach to present a variety of evidence-based strategies for working with children with multiple challenges. It considers children from preschool age to adolescence with a number of severe difficulties. These may include extreme aggression, oppositional defiant behavior, significant anxiety and depression, cognitive and academic challenges, delays in speech and language, problems with attention and concentration, sensory integration problems, and unresolved trauma. The treatment strategies included can be used by various specialists within the intervention team, as well as by parents and teachers.

Children and young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) are far more likely to have communication problems than their peers. Exploring the ways in which children's language and emotional development are linked, Melanie Cross considers the reasons why behavioural and communication difficulties often occur together. Identifying the common causes of these problems, and why they so often go undetected, she provides practical guidelines for assessing communication skills, and describes the complexities of identifying communication problems in children, including those in public care. She shows that improving children's communication skills can also improve their behaviour, and that speech and language therapy is an important, yet often absent, service for children with SEBD.

Among both children and adolescents, depressive disorders confer an increased risk for illness and interpersonal and psychosocial difficulties that persist long after the depressive episode is resolved; in adolescents there is also an increased risk for substance abuse and suicidal behavior. Unfortunately, these disorders often go unrecognized by families and physicians alike. Signs of depressive disorders in young people often are viewed as normal mood swings typical of a particular developmental stage. In addition, health care professionals may be reluctant to prematurely "label" a young person with a mental illness diagnosis. Yet early diagnosis and treatment of depressive disorders are critical to healthy emotional, social, and behavioral development.This new book presents the latest research in the field across a wide spectrum of countries.

This is the standard reference for clinical practice in the mental health field. Since a complete description of the underlying pathological processes is not possible for most mental disorders, it is important to emphasize that the current diagnostic criteria are the best available description of how mental disorders are expressed and can be recognized by trained clinicians. The classification of disorders is harmonized with the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the official coding system used in the United States. The disorders included in DSM-5 were reordered into a revised organizational structure meant to stimulate new clinical perspectives.