This chapter discusses comprehensive school crisis interventions, identifies the characteristics that define a crisis, finds ways to assess for the level of traumatic impact, and determines what interventions can be provided to help with response and recovery. It highlights the PREPaRE Model of crisis prevention and intervention. There are six general categories of crises: acts of war and/or terrorism; violent and/or unexpected deaths; threatened death and/or injury; human-caused disasters; natural disasters; and severe illness or injury. Children are a vulnerable population and in the absence of quality crisis interventions, there can be negative short- and long-term implications on learning, cognitive development, and mental health. Evidence-based interventions focusing on physical and psychological safety may be implemented to prevent a crisis from occurring or mitigate the traumatic impact of a crisis event by building resiliency in students. Crisis risk factors are variables that predict whether a person becomes a psychological trauma victim.

Depression is a chronic, recurring disorder that impacts children’s academic, interpersonal, and family functioning. The heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD) is likely to be in the range of 31% to 42%. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the etiology of depression. It presents a description of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention designed to be delivered in a group format, an individual interpersonal intervention, and an individual behavioral activation (BA) intervention that includes a great deal of parental involvement. The ACTION program is a manualized program that is based on a cognitive behavioral model of depression. There are four primary treatment components to ACTION: affective education, coping skills training (BA), problem-solving training, and cognitive restructuring. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of universal therapeutic techniques to be incorporated into work with depressed youth regardless of the therapeutic orientation or treatment strategy.

Divorce is a lengthy developmental process and, in the case of children and adolescents, one that can encompass most of their young lives. This chapter explores the experience of divorce from the perspective of the children, reviews the evidence base and empirical support for interventions. It provides examples of three evidence-based intervention programs, namely, Children in Between, Children of Divorce Intervention Program (CODIP), and New Beginnings, appropriate for use with children, adolescents, and their parents. Promoting protective factors and limiting risk factors during childhood and adolescence can prevent many mental, emotional, and behavioral problems and disorders during those years and into adulthood. The Children in Between program is listed on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices. The CODIP and the New Beginnings program are also listed on the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices.

This chapter describes the procedural steps of the Assessment Phase and Desensitization Phase of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Standard Protocol with detailed scripts for steering a child through each phase. It includes summary sheets to facilitate gathering information, client documentation, and quick retrieval of salient information while formulating a treatment plan. Assessment phase note section starts with Target Identification; this is a continuation of what began during the Client History and Treatment Planning Phase. The therapist should already have some idea of what the child may choose given previous target identification procedures such as Mapping and Graphing or other procedures for eliciting targets with children. Once the target has been selected, the therapist continues with Image, negative cognition (NC), positive cognition (PC), validity of cognition (VOC), emotion, subjective units of disturbance (SUD), and body sensation to move on to the desensitization phase.

The Maze, as a metaphor for a place where problems live and are solved, was developed out of the necessity of working with children who were too anxious, embarrassed, or afraid to experience the uncomfortable feelings around their problem areas. Such children often present as actively oppositional or sullenly silent. It was necessary to find a distancing technique that was both nonthreatening and interesting to gradually establish communication between therapist and child about issues that cause them discomfort. The main purpose of the maze is to gradually sensitize the child to the possibility of exploring the defended inner space where unpleasant, scary emotions dwell. The maze is a concept with which most children are acquainted. They have experienced both feelings of frustration and competence as they followed the convoluted lines with their pencils in workbooks. The elements of the protocol for maze include the following: maze, drawings and footsteps.

Pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD) has been associated with a number of negative behavioral, academic, and interpersonal outcomes for children and adolescents. It initially received a disruptive behavior disorder diagnosis. High rates of comorbid anxiety disorders have also been found in children with PBD. Psychoeducational psychotherapy (PEP) uses a biopsychosocial model and combines family therapy, psychoeducation, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques with the goal of helping families to better understand and manage the symptoms of PBD and coordinate more effective treatment. This chapter focuses on a description of PEP, including three key interventions of this therapeutic approach: Psychoeducation and Motto, Building a Tool Kit, and Thinking-Feeling-Doing. PEP is a manual-based treatment designed for youth with mood disorders and their caregivers, broken down into separate youth and caregiver sessions. Sessions focus primarily on psychoeducation and skills building and are delivered in individual family (IF-PEP) and multiple family formats (MF-PEP).

Depression in children and adolescents is a serious, potentially life-threatening problem. Traditionally, depression has been diagnosed using two primary categories: major depressive disorder (MDD) or dysthymic disorder (DD). When compared with youth diagnosed with MDD, children and adolescents with persistent depressive disorder (PDD) are at increased risk for having a comorbid psychiatric disorder. The most common treatments of depression include various forms of interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and psychotropic medication. This chapter provides summary of the step-by-step implementation of IPT for depressed adolescents (IPT-A). Many youth struggle with chronic, sometimes debilitating depression for extended periods of time, leading to underachievement, secondary substance abuse, school failure and drop-out, violent or self-harming behavior, and even death by suicide. Clearly, evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions are needed.

This chapter reviews the research on expect respect, second step, and the recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate emotions (RULER) program, curricula with outcome data from US schools for step-by-step implementation by mental health professionals in the hopes of ameliorating this serious epidemic and enhancing the academic, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning of children and adolescents. School bullying and peer victimization are pervasive phenomena that affect many youth. Bullying may inflict harm or distress on the targeted youth including physical, psychological, social, or educational harm. Direct bullying is a relatively open aggressive act on the targeted youth, whereas indirect bullying is not directly communicated to the student being targeted. Moreover, physical, verbal, relational, and damage to property have been identified as specific forms or dimensions of bullying. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an evidence-based framework for reducing a wide variety of problem behavior in school settings.