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Nayar Usha S. (Ed) Child and Adolescent Mental Health SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 2012 pgs. 363
Child and Adolescent Mental Health, a Sage book edited by Usha S. Nayar, past Professor and Deputy Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India offers a rich multicultural perspective on contemporary issues for child and adolescent development, mental health, and well being in a global context. The book invites a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and attempts to weave them into a coherent framework for an interprofessional collaborative approach to meeting the needs of children and youth in a disparate and dynamic global landscape. The topics presented may be viewed as protruding tips of the icebergs that challenge us to bring them further to the surface through research.
The opening section on the economics of child and adolescent mental health sets the stage for the global impact of our collective failure to support child development. The chapter illustrates the resultant burden on society and the placement of the chapter ensures that the readers keep this toll in mind as they encounter each of the themes and cases that follow. Throughout the book we see evidence of the economic and human costs of our failure to globally effectively meet the mental health needs of our children, costs at the level of the individual, family, community, and civilized society. Chapters in Section 2 present compelling clinical case studies that examine factors associated with two of the most prevalent and costly of mental health concerns among children and adolescents: depression and suicidality. These and every chapter tells a story of the complexity and long term consequences of our inaction and helps identify more positive ways forward.
In Section 3, a variety of topics illustrate the influence of our relational and virtual interconnectedness in discussions of HIV/AIDS and media violence. Das, Das and Liebowitz's explore the impact of HIV/Aids on the mental health of children and adolescents in India, highlighting the socio-economic and...