Consultation Skills for Mental Health Professionals

Book excerpt: Consultation interventions are an increasingly popular alternative to clinical practice, allowing the practitioner to interact with and affect many different individuals and organizations. This type of work challenges mental health professionals, drawing on all the skills and resources they may possess, yet also offers some of the greatest rewards and opportunities for service. Filled with numerous case examples and checklists, Consultation Skills for Mental Health Professionals contains a wealth of information on this important area of practice. It provides a comprehensive source for working with a diverse clientele in a variety of settings, discussing both traditional mental health consultation models and the fast-growing field of organizational consulting. The guide is divided into four parts: Individual-Level Consulting Issues takes up individual career assessment and counseling, along with how organizational contexts affect individual jobs; leadership, management, and supervision; executive assessment, selection, interviewing, and development; and executive coaching. Consulting to Small Systems discusses working with teams and groups; planning and conducting training and teambuilding; diversity in the workplace and in consultation. Consulting to Large Systems covers how to work with large organizations, including organizational structure, terms, culture, and concepts, as well as processes such as change and resistance; how to assess organizations, and the characteristics of healthy and dysfunctional workplaces; and issues involved in organizational intervention. Special Consulting Topics include issues such as the practical aspects of running a consulting practice; the skills required for successful clinical consultation; consultation services for special populations; and crisis consultation, including critical incident stress management, psychological first aid, disaster recovery, media communication, and school crisis response.