Mental Health

Course Description
This casebook provides students with personal and intimate glimpses into the thinking and actions of experienced practitioners working with clients on mental health issues. The contributors of this casebook combined many decades of experience and teaching to create an opportunity for students to study and analyze how mental health practitioners think about practice. The authors move beyond the belief that practice involves finding "correct" interventions to solve client problems, and instead invite students to review and challenge the work of others to help them understand what compromises important practice decision with real clients in real practice settings.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the course you’ll be able to:

Chapter 1: A Multi-Systemic Approach to Practice
  1. Define the Advanced Multi-Systemic (AMS) approach to social work practice, and describe its theoretical components.
  2. Identify and utilize the six different dimensions of client information that comprise AMS.
  3. Gather information for multi-systemic assessment process.
  4. Apply strengths-based approach to the client treatment process.
Chapter 2: Alice and Eric
  1.  Examine and explain some of the primary issues involved with families experiencing grief, loss, and fear.
  2.  Identify some of the ethical dilemmas involved with using suicide contracts.
Chapter 3: Dee
  1. Identify challenges involved with establishing a successful therapeutic relationship.
  2. Increase awareness of struggles faced by families coping with multigenerational substances abuse.
Chapter 4: Dan and Ellen
  1. Describe some of the various social work roles and responsibilities when treating clients with depression in individual and couples therapy.
  2. List examples of the use of cognitive behavior therapy to improve communication and self-esteem.
Chapter 5: Carletta
  1.  Demonstrate an understanding of the benefits of using a multi-systemic, “Advanced Generalist” approach with clients.
  2.  Increase awareness of the challenges facing adolescents with chronic health problems.
  3.  Identify some of the important issues associated with treating clients from different religious or cultural backgrounds.