Most learning about children’s mental health problems strives to present one condition at a time. These trainings inform the audience about signs and symptoms, associated issues, epidemiology and prognosis. This is an effective way to teach about diagnoses that present as single conditions in a child. When a child has multiple, overlapping conditions that impair multiple functions, it can be difficult to sort through the signs, symptoms, problems and functional impairments to arrive at a meaningful formulation or case summary. This difficult process of understanding and diagnosing complex cases hinders the development of effective treatment plans, can lead to frustration and anger in treatment staff, children and youth, and their caregivers. This day-long presentation will offer a method to efficiently dig through a child’s complex presentation and will result in the audience being able to arrive at a working formulation, reasonable diagnoses, and vital next steps in the process for helping the child recover.
Learning Objectives:
- The audience will review the 31 areas of mental health difficulties that a child or youth may present with in residential or group home care.
- The audience will be able to differentiate between diagnoses that attempt to describe a child or youth’s clinical condition and use these diagnoses and the case formulation to arrive at a reasonable initial treatment plan.
- The audience will review the 8 Recognized Complex Behavioral Health Disorders that often cooccur in youth in residential or group home care.