This book represents an up-to-date, comprehensive survey of the major contemporary and cutting-edge tools and strategies used in the clinical assessment of couples and families.

This fourth edition text features the latest, most common, and important assessment measures and strategies for addressing problematic clinical issues related to working with families, couples, and children. Chapters provides strategies for systematically utilizing these various assessment measures with a wide range of family dynamics that influence couples and families. These include couples conflict, divorce, separation, mediation, premarital decisions, parenting conflicts, child abuse, family violence, custody evaluation, and child and adolescent conditions, i.e., depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disorders that can significantly influence family dynamics. Filled with extensive clinical case material that illustrates the use of these various assessment measures and strategies in an array of clinical situations, this edition is filled with new assessment devices as well as a new chapter on family trauma and family chronic illness. This book is essential reading for both students in family and couple therapy courses as well as practitioners working with families, couples, and children.

Showing how to weave assessment into all phases of therapy, this indispensable text and practitioner guide is reader friendly, straightforward, and practical. Specific strategies are provided for evaluating a wide range of clinical issues and concerns with adults, children and adolescents, families, and couples. The authors demonstrate ways to use interviewing and other techniques to understand both individual and relationship functioning, develop sound treatment plans, and monitor progress. Handy mnemonics help beginning family therapists remember what to include in assessments, and numerous case examples illustrate what the assessment principles look like in action with diverse clients. See also the authors' Essential Skills in Family Therapy, Third Edition: From the First Interview to Termination, which addresses all aspects of real-world clinical practice, and Clinician's Guide to Research Methods in Family Therapy.

Couples and family psychology is a broad and general specialty in professional psychology that is founded on an understanding of the human experience in a systems context. For the public, the terms "couples" and "family" provide a user friendly translation but underestimate the multifaceted perspectives required of the specialty. Specialists in couples and family psychology have developed unique assessment and treatment methods that impact behavioral and dynamic factors across individuals, couples, families, and larger social systems. In Specialty Competencies in Couple and Family Psychology, Mark Stanton and Robert Welsh provide a comprehensive explanation of the competencies involved in the specialty and illustrates how complexity, reciprocity, interdependence, adaptation, and self-organization are important aspects of the epistemology of a couples and family approach. As the authors underscore for the reader, the specialty of couple and family psychology is not confined to marital or family therapy, but encompasses a broad orientation to human behavior that occurs in the context of relationships as well as larger macrosystemic dynamics. The conceptualization and the application of systemic concepts to human behavior includes a body of knowledge and evidence-based interventions that require specialty training and competence. This is a must-read for all those interested in pursuing couples and family psychology specialty practice. Series in Specialty Competencies in Professional Psychology Series Editors Arthur M. Nezu and Christine Maguth Nezu As the field of psychology continues to grow and new specialty areas emerge and achieve recognition, it has become increasingly important to define the standards of professional specialty practice. Developed and conceived in response to this need for practical guidelines, this series presents methods, strategies, and techniques for conducting day-to-day practice in any given psychology specialty. The topical volumes address best practices across the functional and foundational competencies that characterize the various psychology specialties, including clinical psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology, school psychology, geropsychology, forensic psychology, clinical neuropsychology, couples and family psychology, and more. Functional competencies include common practice activities like assessment and intervention, while foundational competencies represent core knowledge areas such as ethical and legal issues, cultural diversity, and professional identification. In addition to describing these competencies, each volume provides a definition, description, and development timeline of a particular specialty, including its essential and characteristic pattern of activities, as well as its distinctive and unique features. Written by recognized experts in their respective fields, volumes are comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible. These volumes offer invaluable guidance to not only practicing mental health professionals, but those training for specialty practice as well.

This innovative text offers a simple but comprehensive framework for couple assessment that integrates research and information on couples from a wide range of models. Using the 7 Cs as a basis for guiding assessment, chapters move through key areas of couple functioning including communication, conflict resolution, culture, commitment, caring and sex, contract, and character. An additional chapter on children also offers insights into assessment of couples who parent. Offering a broad and accessible framework that can be applied to a variety of theoretical perspectives, the book highlights how the 7 Cs can be used to inform both assessment and treatment of couples. Numerous case examples are interwoven throughout the text to demonstrate how therapists may utilize this approach to work with a diverse client base. Written in an accessible style, Assessment in Couple Therapy is an essential tool for students of marriage and family therapy and beginning therapists, as well as seasoned mental health professionals working with couples in a range of settings.

With the aim of renewing motivation, energy, and creativity in a therapists clinical work, this book explores how common factors may be utilized to increase effectiveness in couple and family therapy. Practicing a specific approach or model for couple and family therapy may fulfill many initial therapist needs, but over time it is developmentally normal for your enthusiasm to wane for a specific way of practicing this therapy. This book therefore provides a common factors framework which may help alleviate feelings of "staleness" and reinvigorate your practice. Different from previous theoretical texts about common factors, this practical book will help you construct a personalized plan that will allow you to take charge of your therapeutic development. The authors present helpful strategies and exercises to build on your previously existing therapeutic skill set, stoke curiosity for the work, counter against burnout and frustration and, most importantly, achieve consistently better outcomes for your clients. This new resource is an essential read for seasoned couple and family therapists who want to improve their clinical skills and personal effectiveness, as well as students and professionals just starting their journey into this type of clinical work.

The fourth edition of this essential resource has dozens of new scales as well as updated information for existing instruments, expanding and cementing its utility for members of all the helping professions, including psychology, social work, psychiatry, counseling, nursing, and medicine. Each instrument is reproduced in its entirety and critiqued by the editors, who provide guidance on how to select and score them. This first volume covers measures for use with couples, families, and children; its companion focuses on adults. Alone or as a set, these classic compendiums are powerful tools that clinicians and researchers alike will find an invaluable addition to - or update of - their libraries. Giving clinicians the scales they need to measure their clients' problems and monitor their outcomes, these all-in-one sourcebooks bring effective, accountable practice within reach for today's busy professionals.

The Wiley Handbook of Art Therapy is a collection of original, internationally diverse essays, that provides unsurpassed breadth and depth of coverage of the subject. The most comprehensive art therapy book in the field, exploring a wide range of themes A unique collection of the current and innovative clinical, theoretical and research approaches in the field Cutting-edge in its content, the handbook includes the very latest trends in the subject, and in-depth accounts of the advances in the art therapy arena Edited by two highly renowned and respected academics in the field, with a stellar list of global contributors, including Judy Rubin, Vija Lusebrink, Selma Ciornai, Maria d' Ella and Jill Westwood Part of the Wiley Handbooks in Clinical Psychology series

As provider networks on military bases are overwhelmed with new cases, civilian clinicians are increasingly likely to treat military families. However, these clinicians do not receive the same military mental-healthcare training as providers on military installations, adding strain to clinicians’ workloads and creating gaps in levels of treatment. Families Under Fire fills these gaps with real-world examples, clear, concise prose, and nuts-and-bolts approaches for working with military families utilizing a systems-based practice that is effective regardless of branch of service or the practitioner’s therapeutic preference. Any civilian mental-health practitioner who wants to understand the diverse needs of military personnel, their spouses, and their families will rely on this indispensable guidebook for years to come.

All of the forms, inventories, checklists, client handouts, and clinical records essential to building and running a successful practice. Has the paperwork monster created by today's managed care environment crippled your couple and family practice? This handy sourcebook—the first in this discipline—is the timesaving resource you've been looking for. It provides couple and family therapists with a full arsenal of tools for assessing and treating clients' problems, and managing today's complicated practices. Providing ready-to-copy blank forms, examples of fully completed forms, and a floppy disk containing all of the blank forms in ready-to-use word-processing files, this invaluable resource will assist you in effectively and efficiently providing services. With The Couple and Family Clinical Documentation Sourcebook you'll spend less time on paperwork and more time with clients. All of the forms, inventories, checklists, client handouts, clinical records, and guidelines essential to building and running a successful practice Ready-to-use blank forms and handouts make it easy to satisfy the paperwork demands of HMOs, insurers, and regulatory agencies Completed copies of forms illustrate the exact type of information required Clear, concise explanations of the purpose of each form—including when it should be used, with whom, and at what point Forms may be copied from the book or customized on the included disk.