ABSTRACT
In the past few years, there has been a major shift in the mental health care of child and adolescents from inpatient care to non-hospital community ambulatory settings. Economic pressures have primarily driven this change in service delivery. Insurance companies and managed care organizations have not only restricted access to hospitalization and limited length of stays but additionally have sharply reduced reimbursements for treatments. State and federal policies for inpatient treatment and reimbursement have followed similar trends. As a result, mental health planners have attempted to develop programs to deal with this trend of restricted inpatient care shifting treatment of children and adolescents to home and community settings. Some of these new programs are well planned and others are hastily planned and implemented. The pitfall to this community approach is that there is a population of chronically disturbed children and adolescents, and highly stressed parents often lacking adequate personal and family resource who may not respond to these new less restrictive, less costly community approaches which potentially may lead to an unsafe and dangerous situation for the child, adolescent, family and the community.
With this in mind, the purpose of this book is to provide comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding child and adolescent outpatient, day treatment and community psychiatry. The emphasis of this book is to provide practical knowledge through clinical case illustrations and to explain various strategies in a detailed fashion.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|46 pages
Ambulatory Services
chapter 1|8 pages
Ambulatory Services for Children and Adolescents
chapter 3|11 pages
Child and Adolescent Services in a Community Mental Health Center
part 2|80 pages
Assessment
part 3|86 pages
Common Disorders of Childhood and Adolescence
part 4|95 pages
Therapeutic Interventions
part 5|36 pages
Day Treatment for Children and Adolescents
part 6|40 pages
Other Community-Based Programs