Mental Health in Early Intervention: Achieving Unity in Principles and Practice

For effective assessment and intervention with infants and young children, professionals need to incorporate psychological, medical, and family factors — but too often, infant mental health and early intervention are dealt with separately rather than together. Integration of these two fields is the goal of this urgently needed text, ideal for introducing mental health concepts to supervisors and students in early intervention and teaching mental health professionals more about early intervention. Readers will

• understand why mental health should be an integral part of early intervention
  
  
• identify specific mental health principles and practices that can be applied to early intervention work
  
  
• improve relationships with families by dealing sensitively with issues related to loss, grief, culture, class, and diversity
  
  
• get an integrated model of infant mental health and early intervention practice, and examine implications of the model for policy and program organization
  
  
• explore professional development options
  
  
• discover, through enlightening interviews, how both mental health and early intervention specialists define their roles and practices
  
  
• take a candid look at the difficulties professionals have had in the past with integrating the two fields

An ideal textbook and professional development resource for early intervention practitioners—and a useful source of insight for mental health professionals—this comprehensive book fully prepares readers to integrate two interdependent fields and improve practices in both.

Gilbert M. Foley, Ed.D., is Associate Professor of the School-Clinical Child Psychology Program at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University, NY. He also serves as Senior Clinical Supervisor at New York University School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Bellevue Hospital Center, and consults to the Manhattan Center for Early Learning, New York. In addition, he is a faculty member of The Infant-Parent Study Center, Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, New York, and of the DIR Institute, Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders, Bethesda, Maryland.

Jane D. Hochman, Ed.D., is a consultant for Policy and Planning for Special Needs Populations, Princeton, NJ. She has been a leader and activist in the field of early intervention for more than 25 years. She has held key policy and planning posititions in the field of early intervention in New Jersey and New York and has lectured in 15 other states and consulted in Great Britain and Singapore as well. Dr. Hochman's earliest academic specialization (bachelor's degree) was in child development. Her master's degree specialization was in educational psychology with a concentration in special education of the hearing impaired. Dr. Hochman earned a doctoral degree in educational leadership and administration.

Samuel Meisels, Ed.D., is a leading authority on early childhood development and assessment. Before joining the Buffett Early Childhood Institute he was president of Erikson Institute for 12 years and remains president emeritus. In addition, he had a 21‐year research career at the University of Michigan, where he is an emeritus professor and research scientist. Earlier he was on the faculty at Tufts University and director of the Eliot‐Pearson Children's School. He has authored more than 200 publications and assessment instruments and holds Master's and doctoral degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an honorary doctor of humane letters from Roosevelt University.