For families with a seriously ill parent--advice on helping your children cope from two leading Harvard psychiatrists Based on a Massachusetts General Hospital program, Raising an Emotionally Healthy Child When a Parent is Sick covers how you can address children's concerns when a parent is seriously ill, how to determine how children with different temperaments are really feeling and how to draw them out, ways to ensure the child's financial and emotional security and reassure the child that he or she will be taken care of.

Written by leading mental health professionals, this warm and accessible parenting book for children with chronic illnesses offers clear, practical guidance for all aspects of the journey. When you're focused on ensuring your child gets the best possible treatments for their symptoms, it's easy to overlook or dismiss the impact the illness can have on your relationships and emotions. This book places your psychological well-being front and center, so you can be the best caregiver possible for your child.

When a parent or parental figure is diagnosed with an illness, the family unit changes and clinical providers should consider using a family-centered approach to care, and not just focus on the patient coping with the illness. Helping Children and Families Cope with Parental Illness describes theoretical frameworks, common parental illnesses and their course, family assessment tools, and evidence-supported family intervention programs that have the potential to significantly reduce negative psychosocial outcomes for families and promote resilience. Most interventions described are culturally sensitive, for use with diverse populations in diverse practice settings, and were developed for two-parent, single-parent, and blended families.

Assessment of the impact of parental illness has gathered significant momentum over recent years. This book provides an up-to-date guide, for a variety of professionals, on how a range of conditions might impact upon children and young people. Each chapter provides an overview of current literature, an evaluation of relevant interventions, an ‘in practice’ section that provides guidance for readers in terms of best practice, and future research directions. Although the primary focus of the book is directed at children’s and young people’s response to their parent’s condition, the challenges of parenting are also frequently highlighted. Additionally, the text provides an overview of measurement issues when investigating children’s and young people’s response to parental illness.

Parents get sick. Their lives change radically, and quickly. This book offers immediate, practical and experienced advice for adult family members and others responsible for the wellbeing of children when one parent has a serious illness. The authors are both clinical social workers with years of training and time spent with children and families in crisis. They establish a clear and authoritative voice, while keeping a tone of encouragement throughout. With its matter-of-fact language, the book is organized to make it easy for parents to turn to the sections they most need, when they need them. Collins and Nathan keep their readers focused on the child in every situation, while always supporting reasonable boundaries in positive self-care for the adults who serve them. The authors remind us that the task of parenting is hard enough, even when Mom and Dad are healthy, energetic and emotionally strong. Add a diagnosis of cancer, heart disease, or a debilitating accident to the mix, and parenting can quickly become overwhelming. They acknowledge that anyone faced with a serious health crisis will be challenged daily to decide on treatment options, to reorient priorities, and to deal with the many stages of grief that humans suffer when confronted with survival issues. They help us remember that one member’s illness will affect the entire family system, and explain how. The book is unique: • It deals with any kind of serious illness, not just cancer. • It explains how children of different age ranges commonly react to a parent’s illness, or other family crisis. • It suggests specific language in talking to children of different ages. • A full chapter is devoted to advantages and disadvantages of using information technology, rarely covered in other books on this topic. • Based on extensive qualitative research. • Includes excerpts from interviews with parents and children coping with illness in the family. Both authors rely on their training, but also on early life experience in which they encountered traumatic family events. As a teenager, Courtney Nathan lost her mother to breast cancer. Leigh Collins suffered a terrible accident as a young child, and was confined in hospital for many weeks. Their book reflects a dedication to other families who face such life-altering circumstances. The book has received wide endorsement from medical doctors and social service personnel who know the urgent need for this information for their patients and

'Warm, wise and practical' Cressida Cowell, MBE An invaluable reference for parents of sick or hospitalised children by an experienced and eminent psychologist. To many parents, it is hard to imagine a more upsetting reality than one where their child is hospitalised, severely sick, or terminally ill. In When Your Child is Sick, psychologist Joanna Breyer distils decades of experience working with sick children and their families into a comprehensive guide for navigating the uncharted and frightening terrain. She provides expert advice to guide them through the hospital setting, at-home care, and long-term outcomes. Breyer's actionable techniques and direct advice will help parents feel more in-control of a circumstance that has upended their life. She alerts parents to key personnel in the hospital, gives dialogue prompts to help parents ask for the help they need, addresses the needs of their other children at home, offers advice on how to best utilise friends and family who want to help, includes stories from other families who have been there, and teaches coping techniques to help both parents and children weather the stress of prolonged illness and even death. When Your Child is Sick is a valuable guide to managing the myriad practical and emotional complications of an impossible situation.

Leading palliative care experts illustrate how you can improve both communication with cancer patients and their quality of life. For more than twenty years, this guide has been the go-to resource for busy practicing oncology and palliative care clinicians. This fourth edition, now titled Comprehensive Guide to Supportive and Palliative Care for Patients with Cancer, provides physicians, advanced practice clinicians, and patients and their families with detailed information and advice for alleviating the suffering of cancer patients and their loved ones. Drawing on the work of experts who have developed revolutionary approaches to symptom management and palliative care, as well as on lessons learned during her decades as a teacher and clinician, Dr. Janet L. Abrahm and her coauthors illustrate how to help patients and families understand their prognosis, communicate their care preferences, and minimize their distress. This edition reflects important updates in the field while addressing the informational needs of a broader market of health care providers, including social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, bereavement counselors, and chaplains. This new edition features three new chapters—"Spiritual Care in Palliative Care," "Psychological Considerations," and "Bereavement"—as well as specific guidelines about • advance care planning at all phases of cancer • understanding complex family dynamics and communication challenges • partnering with interpreters in the care of patients and family members with limited English-language proficiency • special considerations to take into account for LGBTQ+ patients and their loved ones • caring for patients who have a serious mental illness along with a cancer diagnosis • nonpharmacologic management of pain and other symptoms associated with cancer or its treatment The book features self-reflective exercises that encourage readers to consider their own biases before having discussions with patients and family members, as well as numerous patient stories that illustrate the techniques and insights clinicians can use to provide holistic, multidimensional care for a diverse cancer patient population.

DSM-5® Casebook and Treatment Guide for Child Mental Health offers trainees and clinicians who provide mental health services to children and adolescents a concise but conceptually and clinically rich guide to the types of disorders commonly found in practice. The cases are either new or updated from the previous publication, which was designed as a child mental health casebook for DSM-IV-TR, and were chosen to illustrate advances in diagnosis and evidence-based assessment and treatment with DSM-5 in mind. For each case, commentaries are included from a child and adolescent psychiatrist and child psychologist (or another mental health professional), who review each vignette and address diagnostic formulation and treatment from both psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacologic perspectives, with attention to other modalities that might be important for clinical management. This panel approach allows for a diversity of perspectives and provides valuable, complementary insights into each case. The book is structured in a logical, user-friendly way, with many features that facilitate and enhance learning: Cases are divided into four sections, each with an introduction by the editors, who summarize and contextualize the information presented in that part, providing a framework for understanding and building bridges to the other sections. The 29 case vignettes are fascinating, instructive, and diverse. The cases range from fairly clear diagnoses, to more complex presentations (such as when patients with comorbid conditions), to the most difficult cases (when the diagnosis is unclear, the patient has not responded to previous treatment, only limited evidence is available on the correct means of treatment, and/or the patient's psychopathology occurs in the context of extreme psychosocial stressors). The book's final part addresses diagnostic and treatment decision making and includes two chapters on clinical and research issues in the diagnosis and treatment of child psychopathology. The book's cross-disciplinary approach makes it appropriate for clinicians and trainees from all disciplines who are involved in treating children and adolescents with mental health problems. DSM-5® Casebook and Treatment Guide for Child Mental Health is unparalleled in its engaging style, up-to-date information, and expert, evidence-based guidance in conceptualizing diagnosis and treatment.