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Children's Mental Health
Problems and Services
A Report by the Office of Technology Assessment
Duke University Press, 1987
The important mental health problems of children have become the focus of increasing public awareness in the past few years. Adolescent suicide, the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children, alcohol and drug abuse by young people, as well as psychiatric hospitalization of children and adolescents have fueled a growing debate on mental illness and mental health services for our young children.

This book was prepared by the Office of Technology Assessment at the request of Senators Mark Hatfield and Daniel Inouye. It acknowledges that there are no simple solutions to the problems we face or easy answers to questions concerning the best system of mental health service delivery. Yet Children's Mental Health makes it abundantly clear that there is a need for a mental health system response to these issues and that this response must be coordinated with other existing service systems.

This book should be of value to concerned parents and community leaders, health system planners, and health care practitioners involved with both the needs of children and mental illness.

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front cover of Taming the Troublesome Child
Taming the Troublesome Child
American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority
Kathleen W. Jones
Harvard University Press, 2002

When our children act up--whether they're just moody and rebellious or taking drugs and committing crimes--our solution, so often now, is to send them to a psychiatrist or developmental psychologist for help. What makes us think this will work? How did we come to rely on psychological explanations--and corrections--for juvenile misconduct?

In Taming the Troublesome Child, these questions lead to the complex history of "child guidance," a specialized psychological service developed early in the twentieth century. Kathleen Jones puts this professional history into the context of the larger culture of age, class, and gender conflict. Using the records of Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Center from 1920 to 1945, she looks at the relationships among the social activists, doctors, psychologists, social workers, parents, and young people who met in the child guidance clinic, then follows the clinicians as they adapt delinquency work to the problems of nondelinquent children--an adaptation that often entailed a harsh critique of American mothers. Her book reveals the uses to which professionals and patients have put this interpretation of juvenile misbehavior, and the conditions that mother-blaming has imposed on social policy and private child rearing to this day.

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