The Forsaken Child

Residential treatment can be a path to healing or a revolving door. Make the program you're involved with as effective as possible!For a number of years, many mental health professionals, public interest groups, and child advocates have been pressing for the use of increasingly time-limited (short-term) models of residential treatment and psychotherapy for children and adolescents. Yet the children who are most often referred for residential care are clearly more emotionally disturbed than in years past. They have more extensive backgrounds of social failure and often have dysfunctional or barely existent families. The Forsaken Child confronts this dilemma. These essays on the delivery of group care and individual treatment services for young people present an argument for the preservation of thoughtful, humanistic forms of residential treatment. In The Forsaken Child: Essays on Group Care and Individual Therapy, you'll find well-thought-out discussions of:

• Anna Freud's altruistic devotion to providing group care for the infant and child victims of World War I bombings in London, with descriptions of important parallels between her observations of the young war victims in her care and the experiences of abandoned, neglected, and abused children in American cities today
• the historical foundations of milieu treatment and an examination of persisting issues
• the humane concerns of the early founders of residential care vs. the present-day objectivist climate
• a long-term case study of a young child in residential care highlighting a number of clinical issues which contraindicate the use of either brief therapy techniques or short-term group care
• how an interactive, social-constructionist treatment approach helped an adolescent boy in residential care achieve psychological growth and a sense of optimism about the futureThe Forsaken Child will be of significant help to residential facility administrators in longer-range program planning and to social workers and other clinicians who cope with the daily clinical issues that arise in group and individual treatment settings.