Infant Child Mental Health Early Intervention

Book excerpt: A groundbreaking neuroscientific understanding of infant and child development, including a CD-ROM with supplementary worksheets, figures and tables. When early interventions with children fail, clinicians wonder: How could things have been different? The answers seem obvious at first, but a little reflection begins to unveil just how complicated this question really is. Who should have been included in the treatment? With what professionals and using what approaches? When should intervention have occurred? Each question involves a spectrum of both personal and societal issues, which is perhaps why problems that are so widely acknowledged remain so widely ignored. Often, a family is not aware that their story could have had a different ending. So, in response to the critical need for a more cohesive system of care for our youngest patients, this book presents a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary collaboration. Examining the issues of infant mental health and early intervention from a brain-based perspective—one that cuts across all domains—addresses the need for individual practitioners to incorporate the whole picture in relation to their part in assessing and intervening with each individual child and parent, and provides a global framework for team collaboration.