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The Role of the Home Care Mental Health Nurse in Identifying, Accessing, and Treating Children and Adolescents Requiring Mental Health Services
As Assistant Secretary for Health and Surgeon General of the US, Dr. David Satcher (2001) stated, “The burden of suffering experienced by children with mental health needs and their families has created a health crisis in this country…children are suffering needlessly because their emotional,...
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A Clinic’s Initial Experiences Conducting Multiple Family Groups
Jose is an 11-year-old boy who has, for years, been threatening his family to run away and never return when he is upset with them. His family has tried to cope with these behaviors the best they could, but things reached the point that they felt they needed further assistance. His grandmother made...
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Considering Culture in Child and Adolescent Care
Once upon a time our society began teaching children the story of Christopher Columbus, which inhibited children from developing critical multicultural thinking and reinforced racist ideology. A big and powerful “white” country is invading the country of poor Indians of color. You know the rest...
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Engagement in the School Based Clinic Setting: Challenges and Opportunities
The early phase of mental health treatment called “engagement” marks the beginning of an emerging collaboration among provider, child and family. During engagement, clients develop important senses about their providers: Do I like this person? Can they help me? Does it seem like they care about...
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Kids Do Get Better: Values Driven Inpatient Care
In New York State, and across the country, the story of how mental health care began begins with inpatient care provided in large institutions located in a bucolic rural environment. This “humane treatment,” in its day, was considered a progressive avant-garde form of care. For decades this...
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Evidence-Based Practices in a Community-Based Children’s Summer Therapeutic Program: 33 Days to a Better Level of Functioning
This article will describe the synergy derived from bringing an evidence-based curriculum into a summer therapeutic day-camp for children diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed. What child doesn’t look forward to summer vacation from school? And what child doesn’t anticipate attending a...
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Sustainability for Systems of Care
When Orange County, NY received a “System of Care” grant in October 2008, our community set out on a collaborative and ambitious journey to transform the way we care for youth with serious mental health challenges, and their families. Since 1993, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services...
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Are Psychiatric Disorders Over-diagnosed in Children? Are Medicines Over-prescribed? 13 Myths & Facts
Headlines scream that too many kids are taking Ritalin or Adderall or whatever the latest ADHD medicine du jour is. TV’s talking heads complain that we’re drugging our kids with Prozac, Zoloft and other “dangerous drugs.” But your child’s teacher recommends your child be “evaluated”...
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Activities in Group Work with Children and Adolescents
The use of physical, and other, activities in group work is more than a “tool,” more than programmed content, more than “canned” exercises, and more than a mechanistic means to an end. Group work scholar Ruth Middleman aptly described the “toolness of program more as putty than a hammer,...
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Principles of Group Work with Children and Youth Trauma Survivors
Group work is indispensable for children and youth in the aftermath of traumatic events. Group work can serve as a counterforce to bleak outcomes that result from isolation in the aftermath of disaster. It can help to empower young people by restoring human dignity, building coping skills, helping...
