May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. This is a great time to highlight the importance of mental wellness and school-based mental health services to children's positive learning and development. There is heightened urgency to the imperative to advance school-based mental health and school psychologists' expertise as essential to the…

Until relatively recently, most psychologists have had limited professional involvement with older adults. With the baby boomers starting to turn 65 years old in 2011, sheer numbers of older adults will continue to increase. About 1 in 5 older adults has a mental disorder, such as dementia. Their needs for mental and behavioral health services are…

Ongoing, strategic family-school partnering (FSP) is an essential component of every educational community. FSP is a multi-dimensional process in which schools, families, and communities engage in shared actions to ensure a child's academic, social, and emotional success. With this text, the authors intend to offer a practical guide that…

The Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 was designed to address the wide variation in local authority provision for care leavers and to promote a more multi-dimensional approach to the process of leaving care. Care leavers are likely to be at greater risk of mental health difficulties than other young people and the transitional period from leaving…

Few studies have examined graduate students and stress. At a large, Southeastern university, 223 graduate students completed a survey about factors contributing their stress, current coping strategies and related university services. A majority felt stressed (48.9%) or very stressed (24.7%). There were significant differences in coping strategies…

This manual provides a brief framework of organization that serves as a response tool for a wide spectrum of crisis circumstances encountered by schools. It is meant to be a generic guide for school teams and should be customized by each school that uses it. Even with emergency procedures in place, each crisis at a school needs to be evaluated as…

Survey of 20 community mental health centers in 12 Midwest grain belt farm states found continuum of farm crisis problems requires professional responses consistent with philosophy and goals of community mental health. Results indicate responses vary, not in relationship to severity of problems, but because of center philosophy and resource…

The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health solicited public comment from stakeholders in the mental health community on various topics related to the Commissions mission. The goal was to gain a better understanding of the publics experiences with, concerns about, and hopes for the mental health care system. More than twelve hundred…

Following a brief introduction, this paper focuses on how the Texas Project for Elders, one of ten sites in the country participatng in the National Long-Term Care Channeling Demonstration Project (Channeling), has taken into account the mental health needs of clients and caregivers both in the development and delivery of services. The clients…

Identifies characteristics and competencies that define the right kind of person for rural mental health center administration. In order of importance, characteristics defined are leadership ability, appreciation of rural community, program development, professional background and training, political savvy, personnel management, budget and fiscal…

Schools have a yearly rhythm--changing with the cycle and demands of the school calendar. There is the Season of Hope as the school year starts; then comes homework discontent, conferences of concern, grading and testing crises, newspaper attacks, worries about burnout, and the search for renewal. In keeping with all this, the material compiled…

Schools can be the optimal place for the coordination of the efforts of educators, families and mental health professionals to ensure that every child learns in a safe, healthy and supportive environment. Mental health services are an important resource that schools provide to help students benefit from education. By removing social/emotional…

This manual provides resource tools and strategies to enhance the suicide prevention capabilities of health professionals and the health care setting in which care is provided. In the first section, terms are defined and the suicide prevention triangle model is described. Applications of the model and good practices for suicide prevention in any…

Block granting disburses mental health funds largely at the discretion of state mental health authorities, and state priorities typically focus on the most severely ill persons. Rural centers may suffer because multipurpose programs responding to a wide range of community needs are excluded from the mental health service delivery concept. (JHZ)

In a survey of 4 North Dakota communities, 40% of the respondents knew of the area's mental health center. Distance from the center, sex, and educational level were associated with awareness of the center's existence. Respondents sought aid from medical and religious resources more often than from mental health resources. (JHZ)