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Children with emotional and behavioral disturbance often have difficulties in multiple symptom domains. This study investigates the relationships between child symptoms and caregiver strain and parenting stress among 177 youth and their caregivers participating in a school-based system of care. Youth were grouped by symptom domain and included those with low scores on both internalizing and externalizing symptoms, those with only high internalizing symptoms, those with only high externalizing symptoms, and those with high symptoms levels in both internalizing and externalizing domains. Results revealed significant group differences on measures of caregiver strain and parenting stress. Caregivers of youth with symptoms in both internalizing and externalizing domains reported the highest levels of strain and stress; however, there was some variation in group differences by caregiver outcome. The results of this study emphasize the importance of providing not only services for youth but also support services for their caregivers.

This study illustrates an experience of implementing a hybrid model for teaching human behavior in the social environment in an urban university setting. Developing a hybrid model in a BSW program arose out of a desire to reach students in a different way. Designed to promote curiosity and active learning, this particular hybrid model has students engage in weekly online activities between their weekly on-ground classes. This article reviews key pedagogical concerns and presents preliminary findings, including student feedback, instructor observations, and strategies for faculty interested in developing such courses. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Most undergraduate students pursue a social work major because of their desire to help others. Students tend to be more interested in doing than in understanding the research and knowledge of the profession and the complexities of social work practice. Instructors are often faced with the challenge of enhancing student motivation to learn challenging course material. This study explored student perceptions of instructor influences on their motivation and engagement in learning. Through online surveys, students described their experiences of being known and how those experiences affected their participation in practice, research, and human behavior in the social environment courses. Results showed that instructor caring (providing recognition, expressing relational qualities, and responding to students) positively influences student motivation and affective learning by increasing comfort, willingness to ask questions, take risks, and overall participation. Conversely, of those who reported mixed experiences or who felt unknown, most reported a negative impact on their motivation and participation. These findings suggest that social work faculty can influence student motivation and engagement with essential social work curriculum by expressing care and helping students feel known in the classroom. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

This study examined clients who were admitted to a mental health respite program in the first 3 months of 2011 in order to identify the ability of the program to reduce symptom distress and to explore related psychosocial factors. Participants were provided with self-report questionnaires that included measurements of demographics, mental health status, symptom severity, and program satisfaction. Results indicate a significant improvement in symptom distress (p < 0.05), mental health confidence (p < 0.1), and self-esteem (p < 0.05) from admission to discharge. No change was detected in largely external measurements.

Home-based programs provide a growing number of mental health and case-management services to high-risk children, adolescents, and their families. The clinical service providers who work directly with these children and families have varying degrees of education and practice experience as well as a range of different supervisory needs. Because of the daily challenges service providers face, they require support from competent, available supervisors. The professionals who supervise them often assume that responsibility with limited, if any, training in providing supervision. New and experienced supervisors alike often find themselves in positions for which they are ill prepared, without suitable training or administrative support. This article describes a supervision seminar developed for supervisors who supervise the clinicians who provide home-based services. The seminar provides training, support, consultation, and other forms of assistance to help supervisors adapt their clinical skills for use in their supervisory roles.

Women's childbirth experiences are not widely researched in the social work literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to answer questions related to the child-birthing experience. One hundred and nineteen participants responded to a 26-item online questionnaire between April and June 2008, and their written narratives were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Themes regarding the spiritual dimensions of childbirth emerged from the data and support current research demonstrating the importance of spirituality in women's lives and the meaningful and transformative nature of childbirth experiences. Implications for addressing spirituality in practice when working with childbearing women are explored. Future research that explores how spirituality may function as a protective factor for women with difficult pregnancies, births, and transitions to parenting is recommended.

This article explores the question of how human beings change, how change is constrained, and how change emerges out of and subsequently creates new forms of stability with adults. The emergence of Dynamic Systems Theories (DST) from developmental biology and neuroscience provide the tools to engage in such an understanding by attending to the issues of time, balance, influencing parameters (within person and sociocultural and material environments), and multiple adaptive and maladaptive pathways. DST provides the framework to understand the dynamic processes of bio-psychosocial factors that provide human beings with the stability and the flexibility to navigate the challenges and stressors of living. Complexity, the ability to experience inner continuity as one is changing, is a fluid balance that supports effective functioning. Findings: Key principles and concepts of DST describe multiple pathways of stability and change. A case example illustrates how DST helps social workers understand client experiences and responses to stressors, formulate initial and ongoing assessments, and monitor clients' participation in change activities. Application: Social workers seek to help people who experience an imbalance due to an inability to effectively respond to the negative impact of a stressor. By understanding the various pathways of balance and imbalance along the continuum of continuity to change, social workers can better understand how stressors are impacting specific clients, and subsequently the kinds of change that would best assist each client.

lessons learned from previous efforts with the goal of "getting it right" this time. In response to the common refrain that we know about and 'do' recovery already, the authors set the recovery movement within the conceptual framework of major thinkers and achievers in the history of psychiatry, such as Philippe Pinel, Dorothea Dix, Adolf Meyer, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Franco Basaglia. The book reaches beyond the usual boundaries of psychiatry to incorporate lessons from related fields, such as psychology, sociology, social welfare, philosophy, political economic theory, and civil rights. From Jane Addams and the Settlement House movement to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gilles Deleuze, this book identifies the less well-known and less visible dimensions of the recovery concept and movement that underlie concrete clinical practice. In addition, the authors highlight the limitations of previous efforts to reform and transform mental health practice, such as the de-institutionalization movement begun in the 1950s, in the hope that the field will not have to repeat these same mistakes. Their thoughtful analysis and valuable advice will benefit people in recovery, their loved ones, the practitioners who serve them, and society at large. Foreword by Fred Frese, Founder of the Community and State Hospital Section of the American Psychological Association and past president of the National Mental Health Consumers' Association. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Direct practice social workers today are challenged to address the requirements of the complex array of professional, organizational, institutional, and regulatory demands placed on them in the broader socioeconomic context of fewer resources and diminished public support for social welfare services in the United States. The common factors model provides an accessible, transtheoretical, empirically supported conceptual foundation for practice that may help to resolve this conundrum and support effective practice. Common factors are conditions and processes activated and facilitated by strategies and skills that positively influence practice outcomes across a range ofpractice theories. The model provides an expanded conceptualization of the "active ingredients" required for change to include a focus on conditions and processes as well as practice strategies and to focus on all who are involved in the work. The model is described and implications for practice are discussed.

Constructing mutual, spiritually focused psychotherapy goals is a practice activity fraught with numerous ethical and countertransferential challenges. This article seeks to inform the thinking and enhance the ability of clinical social workers to engage in collaborative and responsive dialogues with their clients regarding the goals of spiritually focused clinical practice by (1) identifying the multiple value frameworks that influence decisions regarding practice goals, (2) articulating some of the ethical complexities and common countertransferential reactions associated with goal setting, and (3) providing self-reflection questions and guides to help therapists navigate the complexities of this material.

Although research is beginning to capture the complex interactions of biopsychosocial variables operating within experiences of stressors and trauma, the bodies of research have remained largely separate and limited. This study describes a scaffold of factors and pathways based on principles from dynamic systems theories (DST) to organize the literatures on stress and coping and trauma and resilience. As a process model, DST provides the language to understand both impact and response to stressors and trauma: Not as a list of symptoms but as interactive processes within persons and between persons and their surroundings. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.