The Adoption Competent Mental Health Guides were recently released in California to help build mental health capacity and competency for post-adoption youth. The guides were created as part of AB 1790, which addressed barriers to the availability of adoption/permanency mental health professionals and created recommendations to remove those barriers.
Why does it matter? Adoptive parents speak loud and strong: “working with clinicians who do not understand out special issues can do more harm than good. We have nowhere to turn.” We owe it to those parents to build a cadre of mental health providers with the needed specialized training and experience.
Somewhere to Turn: Meeting the Mental Health Needs of Adoptive and Guardianship Families is published as four separate guides for various groups.
Population of focus: child welfare agencies, behavioral health agencies
Links to resource:
- Read the news release announcing Somewhere to Turn
- Access the guide for each audience:
Date: 2018