Mental Health in Early Intervention: Achieving Unity in Principles and Practice

For effective assessment and intervention with infants and young children, professionals need to incorporate psychological, medical, and family factors - but too often, infant mental health and early intervention are dealt with separately rather than together. Integration of these two fields is the goal of this urgently needed text, ideal for introducing mental health concepts to supervisors and students in early intervention and teaching mental health professionals more about early intervention. Readers will understand why mental health should be an integral part of early intervention identify specific mental health principles and practices that can be applied to early intervention work, improve relationships with families by dealing sensitively with issues related to loss, grief, culture, class, and diversity, get an integrated model of infant mental health and early intervention practice, and examine implications of the model for policy and program organization, explore professional development options discover, through enlightening interviews, how both mental health and early intervention specialists define their roles and practice, take a candid look at the difficulties professionals have had in the past with integrating the two fields. An ideal textbook and professional development resource for early intervention practitioners - and a useful source of insight for mental health professionals - this comprehensive book fully prepares readers to integrate two interdependent fields and improve practices in both.