Collaborative Care and Partnerships in Autism Diagnosis and Treatment

This book examines strategies for strengthening collaborations – and improving sometimes problematic relationships – between therapists, parents, and autistic children. It emphasizes the importance of therapists involving parents in their child’s interventions and details ways in which therapists can train parents to practice the same cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skills their child needs to develop and improve. In addition, the book describes how primary care providers can empower parents to become collaborative partners, giving them tools and strategies to move forward with their concerns and weigh different options in seeking help. Chapters focus on critical therapeutic moments that encourage children to discover who they are, develop their own willpower as well as connect past, present and future events to become more socially connected.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Describing the ways in which culture and gender may affect diagnosis and treatment of autistic children.
• Exploring intervention strategies that ensure the best possible outcomes for autistic children.
• Examining therapeutic issues that span the difficult period of receiving a diagnosis through early childhood, youth, and adulthood.
• Leveraging the elements of connection between parents and their autistic children to ensure therapeutic success.

Collaborative Care and Partnerships in Autism Diagnosis and Treatment is an invaluable resource for clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in clinical child and school psychology, developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, clinical social work, special education, speech-language therapy, and all related disciplines.