Mental health professionals who both provide services and effectively make use of them to address their own emotional or psychiatric challenges are called wounded healers. Despite the potential benefits of lived experience, these professionals often must contend with institutions and systems that are discriminatory. The authors use life-writing to…

Catherine Bradshaw, PhD, MEd, is a professor and the senior associate dean for research and faculty development at the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. She was previously the associate editor for the "Journal of Research on Adolescence" and is currently the editor of "Prevention…

The author of this commentary responds to an article titled "How We Might Make Special Education for Students with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders Less Stigmatizing," by J.M. Kaufmann and J. Bader, who maintain that identifying youth as having emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) and providing treatment for them is viewed to be…

Recent publications in the "Journal of Youth and Adolescence" present a variety of topics exploring adolescents' mental functioning in the twenty first century. Conceptually, many of the articles address the intriguing, though rarely explicit, question of developmental continuities and change from adolescence to adulthood. Such…

The emphasis or focus of a professional association often shifts imperceptibly over time in ways that neither its membership nor its leadership seems able to recognize until pivotal events compel it to do so. The historical shift from psychodynamic to behavioral approaches in special education for children with emotional or behavioral disorders…

This is an edited version of a recent interview with Annette Mendelsohn, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Royal Free Hospital, London, UK. It aims to make available in published form Mendelsohn's thinking and approach in relation to her work with traumatised children in a hospital setting. Mendelsohn also discusses her work in a…

Watters questions the universality of mental illness and warns of the harms that accompany the exportation of Western typologies to non-Western cultures. He is particularly concerned that these effects will be exacerbated by the upcoming revisions of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("DSM-V").…

This article provides estimates of emotional and behavioral problems in children and their service utilization patterns. A model for the study of children's help-seeking pathways is offered and used to review the empirical support for variables associated with help-seeking, primarily help-seeking of formal mental health services. (DB)

Discusses the framework and service components of seven major community services which make up a model system of care for severely emotionally disturbed children and their families. (RJC)

Examines Progressive Life Center's (PLC) Therapeutic Foster Care program and its incorporation of NTU psychotherapy into its program model. Describes how PLC strives to improve the delivery of mental health services through culturally competent therapeutic techniques for African Americans, including seriously emotionally disturbed children. (MOK)

This article offers a developmental ecological approach as a useful model for addressing the complexities of emotional disturbances in children. It sees the systems of care movement in children's mental health as congruent with the developmental ecological perspective and as providing a mechanism for responding to the multidimensional aspects of…

Noting that treatment foster care is a recent and expanding multisystem service, this article summarizes the empirical literature on treatment foster care and offers suggestions for future research directions. Results from program evaluations and experimental research suggest that treatment foster care is an effective alternative to residential…

Defines primary prevention for mental health and explores how the therapeutic process can be patterned after the family developmental life cycle. Examines the family's role in primary prevention and describes anticipatory guidance, support provision, education, and emphasis on strengths as ways of coping. (Author/MJL)

A systems perspective is offered of cooperation among various agencies providing educational and related services to severely emotionally disturbed children. The systems view is described in terms of interfaces of four subsystems which exist in each agency--structural, technological, human, and communication. The structural interface involves…

This article presents challenges facing child mental health services research and the contributions made by the series of papers in this journal issue. The series illustrates two major categories of services research: systems level research and clinical services level research. Methodological issues, particularly for randomized clinical trials in…