DSM-5® Pocket Guide for Child and Adolescent Mental Health

This book takes an intensely practical approach to initial diagnosis and management of behavioral health problems in children and youth, making it useful for any clinician who provides care to children in an outpatient setting. It has the same degree of empathy for the clinicians using it that we all hope to provide for the children and families we care for.

This book is a compendium, in 170 pages, of practical clinical wisdom regarding the assessment and treatment of psychiatric problems in children and adolescents. It is a highly useful translation and expansion of DSM-5 for the pediatric population, where familial, developmental, environmental, and contextual factors make the diagnostic process especially challenging. Drs. Hilt and Nussbaum's calm and exquisitely clear prose makes this volume a delight to read no matter what one's discipline or level of training.

This book takes an intensely practical approach to initial diagnosis and management of behavioral health problems in children and youth, making it useful for any clinician who provides care to children in an outpatient setting. It has the same degree of empathy for the clinicians using it that we all hope to provide for the children and families we care for.

This book is much more than an excerpt or summary of the sections of DSM-5 which are particularly relevant to children and adolescents. Instead, the authors have created a practical guide and real world tool to facilitate the diagnostic assessment of young patients. I am confident it will prove to be a useful resource for both trainees and practicing clinicians.

Robert Hilt and Abraham Nussbaum have written an efficient and effective guide to the mental health interview and use of DSM-5 with children and adolescents. Together with the handy tables provided regarding treatments, this summary and explanation of the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria and detailed guide to the clinical interview will be useful to all clinicians working with youth, especially those in primary care. The authors emphasize that when evaluating a young patient, the practitioner must consider all aspects, not only of the patient, but also of the family, school, and community, and develop the relationship before launching into a symptom checklist.

Hilt and Nussbaum's DSM-5 Pocket Guide is an outstanding, user -friendly, clinically meaningful interpretation of disorders relevant to those of us evaluating and treating children and adolescents. It provides not only youth-specific information on the disorders; it provides very useful ways of soliciting the information as well as guidelines for treatment planning, and psychopharmacologic and psychosocial treatments. Think of the volume as cutting the huge plate of child and adolescent diagnosis, psychopathology and treatment into bite-sized and easy to swallow pieces! Clinicians caring for the mental health of children shouldn't be without it!