Interview and assessment methods for children may vary remarkably from the techniques implied towards the adults. First, practitioners should always keep in mind, that there are significant links between maternal prenatal distress and child behavioral and cognitive outcomes (O’Connor, Monk, & Fitelson, 2013). It means that before gathering the information about the child, therapists are to know if there had been any potential psychiatric risks for the child during pregnancy, such as mother’s depression, anxiety, or stress. Second, clinicians are to keep the emphasis on the child, as the patient in most cases is the primary source of information about his or her mental health. Self-report instruments, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, along with projective-expressive techniques, such as thematic approaches, drawing, and sentence completion tasks, are to be considered during the assessment (Whitcomb, 2013). Third, therapists would need to gather information about the child from the caregivers such as parents, teachers, family doctors, and schoolteachers.
Gathering relevant background information about the cultural and religious aspects of a patient’s life is also crucial. For instance, a child reports that he or she turned vegetarian diet. While in most families this may be considered as a source of conflict with other family members, in most Hindu families, where parents are most likely vegetarians, such child’s decision may become a step to reconciliation with the family. Getting to know whether the patient is religious or not is also essential, as religion is one of the first resources people turn to when faced with an illness (Pargament & Lomax, 2013).
The main thing I have learned from the session is that practitioners should always keep in mind the cultural and social aspects while gathering the information from children and their caregivers. As Whitcomb (2013) mentions, today’s “assessment practices have not gone far enough in promoting equity and utility across various ethnocultural groups” (p. 136). In the future, I will not only gather information about not only the child’s socio-cultural environment but also the background of the caregivers, as it may influence the overall psychiatric assessment considerably.
References
O’Connor, T., Monk, C., & Fitelson, E. (2013). Practitioner review: Maternal mood in pregnancy and child development – implications for child psychology and psychiatry. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 55(2), 99-111.
Pargament, K., & Lomax, J. (2013). Understanding and addressing religion among people with mental illness. World Psychiatry, 12(1), 26-32.
Whitcomb, S. A. (2013). Behavioral, social, and emotional assessment of children and adolescents. New York, NY: Routledge.