Review of “Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders," by Mayer, Matthew J.; Van Acker, Richard; Lochman, John E.; and Gresham, Frank M., 2009.
New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Paper, 409 pages.
The relatively high number of homeless persons suffering from mental illness in Edgewater and Uptown (Chicago neighborhoods) is just one reason we as helpers need to keep reading and learning about solutions. This range of challenges on the street is common in other cities, also, where there is a paucity of treatment options and suitable agencies to handle the high number of persons in need.
Challenges of mental illness are increasing with the stress of COVID-19 and other illnesses and dangers, including terrible weather, not just in the US but in other nations as well. More homework for helpers. More books for professors, counselors, advocates, and teacher-educators to read.
Luckily, there are so many great sources for helpers of persons dealing with mental illness—whether they be abandoned persons living on the street, K-12 students needing assistance, or college students facing challenges. StreetSense is glad to provide helpers with resources—some of which are basic and some of which are more technical.
Mayer’s team has compiled here a more technical manual for counselors. This book brings together research, treatment methods, and explanations of approaches from three different fields and is exciting because of the ground-breaking plan to get professionals in these diverse areas communicating more.
Experts from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), experts in emotional disorders, and educators working with behavioral disorders converge on the intersection of young persons in trouble who need special help and treatment.
The team behind this book has a variety of training. The editors and authors of this book believe strongly in the importance of bringing the disparate groups of experts together in order to open a dialogue and share resources.
These collaborative models—in this case pre-COVID in composition, can yield some very helpful models for bringing professionals from different “silos” and traditions together. Not to say it is a non-brainer… but does it not seem to make sense to bring together a range of well-trained and experienced experts with different perspectives to deal with difficult problems?
Too often in the past, experts in therapy did not communicate enough with special education experts, and classroom teachers did not have enough background in either of these two areas to be able to forge a connection that could be used effectively in their teaching and counseling of students.
This book attempts to bring the most important issues to the forefront and get experts and educators speaking to each other. What can be used in schools and colleges can also be used in the street…
Experts in CBT lay out the important uses of this form of intervention and show ways to adapt the approach to practical situations. The first section explains the foundations of cognitive-behavioral interventions and explains the importance of both changing the person’s thoughts and requiring the individual to complete homework to change what they are doing.
These two basic components of CBT are at the heart of the text.
The second section deals specifically cognitive-behavioral interventions for anger and aggression. The third deals with the use of cognitive-behavioral interventions for symptoms of anxiety and phobic disorders. The fourth part provides relief for students faced with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and with autism spectrum disorders.
The fifth section deals with the promise of cognitive-behavioral interventions in the classroom in the future, in addition to the challenges facing those who attempt to employ them and adapt them to serve more students. As in many cross-cutting solutions, there are immediate issues to face. For example, many classroom teachers do not have an infinite number of credits in psychopathology, counseling techniques, or research.
In addition, many experts in cognitive-behavioral interventions do not have experience in teaching…
and often less background for working with children in a structured classroom setting, often being instead researchers and professors in higher education.
I think this is an excellent book overall. I think it is a very important one for teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher educators to read. There are some difficult and rather technical passages, and these will take more study than other parts of the book. However, it is worth it overall for counselors, researchers, and educators to work together to draw resources from each other to better serve children.
It is important often to work as a team to approach solutions. Serving persons facing the challenges of mental illness in a more informed and interdisciplinary way is one of the main goals here.