Chapter One Summary

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Chapter’s one summary

Chapter one form the School Based Mental Health: A Practitioner’s guide to comparative Practices (Christner & Mennuti, 2009) starts by stating the importance of school based mental health in the US school. This need is due to the increasing number of students with internalizing problems. About 10% of a 44 million of students attending school daily will meet criteria for a mental health disorder. These findings suggest that the need for mental health services in-schools is of great necessity.

As it is known school-based service delivery encompass a broad range of services amongst which services that deal with behavioral and emotional problems, from a preventive or reactive approach. The authors give a multi-level classification of type mental health services delivery, ranging from universal interventions, targeted interventions, intensive interventions, to crisis services. The mentioned levels of intervention are delimited and supported by community-based services and supportive learning environments.

Universal Interventions Level

This is a level that regards school wide or number of neighboring schools in terms of assessment of mental health of their students. It can rely on different data collection instrument, we can talk at this level about focus group data, survey data, preexisting school data, preexisting community data, preexisting school data. The goal at this level is to meet the needs of at least 85% of school population. In addition to the aforementioned sources of data collection, progress monitoring of on-going intervention and post assessment data are of beneficial value to determine the different needs that the school is encountering in terms of mental health services delivery. Examples of...

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Clearly, school psychologists, counselors, social worker, and specialized crisis interventions teams are the professionals qualified to provide and deliver services at this level and also in the other different levels. In order to give a broad idea of the different risk factors categories that were found representative of the actual state of affairs in US schools, the authors (Christner & Mennuti, 2009) listed the following categories constitutional handicaps, skill development delays, emotional difficulties, family circumstances, interpersonal problems, and Ecological risks. Consequently, we can conclude that risk factors of mental health covers personal, interpersonal, and environmental factors, hence, mental heath delivery professionals should be aware of these factors that can be detrimental to students’ achievement and emotional wellbeing.

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