From the Back Cover
A comprehensive guidebook to diagnosing and treating youth with SED
Handbook of Serious Emotional Disturbance in Children and Adolescents presents current theory, research, practice, and policy concerning serious emotional disturbance (SED) and highlights opportunities for practitioners to serve this large and vulnerable population. As many as one in five children has a diagnosable mental disorder, yet many go undiagnosed and receive little or no treatment for their problems, which can worsen with age. This multidisciplinary, multisystemic handbook fills the need for a current and comprehensive resource that targets the most severe and persistent mental disorders of childhood and adolescence.
Featuring contributors that include the leading SED experts, this practical resource encompasses a wide range of practice, research, and training issues. It outlines the process of integrating systems-of-care values into university-based training, underscores the need for competence in children's mental health services, and includes the voices of adolescents and college students with early-onset mental disorders. Specific SED disorders and their evidence-based treatments are explored, including autism, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, ADHD, psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suicidal behavior.
The focus then shifts to systems of care, where home-based treatment is addressed, as well as collaborative models for working with families that have a child diagnosed with SED. Also included are discussions of school-based intensive mental health treatment and the role of the primary health care system in SED, as well as empirically supported family- and community-based interventions contributed by leading researchers and clinicians in the field.
The future holds great hope as well as tremendous challenges for children's mental health. This important work is a must for all professionals who work with children and adolescents and wish to advance the progress of care.
About the Author
DIANE T. MARSH, PhD, chairs the American Psychological Association Task Force on Serious Mental Illness and Serious Emotional Disturbance and is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.
MARY A. FRISTAD, PhD, ABPP, is a member of the Task Force and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Ohio State University.
Both have published extensively on professional practice with children and adolescents who have early-onset mental illness and with their families.
