Tara Snyder; Michael Sterba Jennifer Resetar Volz

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Teaching Social Skills To Youth With Mental Health Disorders

HERE IS A guide for therapists, counsellors, psychologists, teachers and other practitioners to incorporate the teaching of social skills as a component of treatment for children diagnosed with mental health disorders. Research and experience show that children and adolescents who struggle with emotional, behavioural and social problems do improve when they learn pro-social skills.Included is an introduction to the DSM-IV-TR and other mental health assessment and evaluation tools and guidance for how to individualise treatment plans while considering children's developmental, cultural, behavioural, emotional social, genetic and biological variables. Following a discussion of the importance and effectiveness of skill teaching in the treatment of mental health disorders, the authors provide a series of charts that list the social skills that carers and treatment providers might target for each of more than a hundred DSM-IV-TR diagnoses common for children and adolescents. Examples of treatment plans show how social skills can be integrated into plans across different settings and levels of care - home and school, foster care, residential home and psychiatric facility.