Child Mental Health Practice From the Ecological Perspective

Most mental health professionals today have emerged from training systems with individualistic and compartmentalized orientations. The ecological perspective, however, is a contextual approach which works at the interface between families and the broader ecology or eco-system of the child; the approach is not new but has not been widely adopted due to the lack of illustrative material for practitioners. Through an approach more descriptive and explanatory than empirical, the author shows the clinician why the child’s environment is cruicial and provides techniquest to draw people in the child’s environment into the healing process.