Research and experience show that children and adolescents who struggle with emotional, behavioral and social problems do improve when they learn prosocial skills. Social skill instruction, therefore, can be a vital component in the treatment planning for a child diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Teaching Social Skills to Youth with Mental Health Disorders is a guide for therapists, counselors, psychologists, educators, and other practitioners trying to help these youth get better. In this book, you’ll find an introduction to the DSM-IV-TR and other mental health assessment and evaluation tools and how to individualize treatment plans while considering children’s developmental, cultural, behavioral, emotional, social, genetic, and biological variables. Following a discussion of the importance and effectiveness of skill teaching in the treatment of mental health disorders, the authors provide a series of charts that list the social skills that caregivers and treatment providers might target for each of more than a hundred DSM-IV-TR diagnoses common for children and adolescents. Finally, examples of treatment plans show you how social skills can be integrated into plans across different settings and levels of care – home and school, foster care, residential group home, and psychiatric facility.