Deepening Our Clinical Practice in
Solidarity for Social Justice:
Diversity-Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets
Infant mental health is a social justice issue. Despite broad awareness of the dangers of adverse early experience and the potent impact of timely intervention, there continue to be vast unmet needs across the
socioeconomic spectrum of young children and their families, with particularly unacceptable gaps in access and quality of mental health and early childhood learning services for poor children, many of whom are African American, Latino, or Native American or represent other non-dominant racial and ethnic communities. In many cases, the infant mental health field is disproportionately Caucasian, while many of the most vulnerable young children are children of color. In order to create a just and equitable society for the infants and toddlers with whom we work, the field must intentionally address some of the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other inequities embedded in our society.
Working in isolation to combat injustice, individual practitioners will be able to have only a limited impact.
Furthermore, oppression works in insidious ways, often manifesting in individual experiences of personal failure that mask the root causes of trouble. In order to address these obstacles to achieving social justice,
a group of infant mental health workers have collaboratively generated the Diversity-Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets, a set of ten guiding principles outlining standards of practice in the field and pointing the way to
a just society via engaged professional practice.
Scope of Workshop and Objectives
The Diversity-Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets are a set of ten guiding principles that raise awareness of inequities and injustices embedded in our society by empowering individual practitioners, agencies and systems of care to identify and address the social justice issues intricately intertwined with all infant mental health work.
This workshop introduces participants to the Tenets via vignette presentation, lecture and discussion. Each Tenet is considered in light of its salience with respect to a range of spheres of work: clinical practice, teaching/training, research/writing, and policy/advocacy. Presenters will demonstrate in-vivo application of the Tenets to participant-provided practice dilemmas, leading to group discussion reflecting on the Tenets and thinking together about applicability and implementation of the Tenets. Participants will emerge from this training with a deeper understanding of the social justice issues interwoven into their sphere of practice, a new tool set for identifying and addressing obstacles to achieving social justice via their work, and strategies for bringing these tools into their daily practice and professional communities.
Learning Objectives for each participant includes:
Presenters
Carmen Rosa Noroņa, MSW, MS. Ed., CEIS, is the clinical coordinator of the Child Witness to Violence Project /associate director of the Boston Site of the Early Trauma Treatment Network at Boston Medical Center-Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. Her practice and research interests are on the impact of trauma on attachment, the intersection of culture, immigration and trauma, tailoring mental health services to new immigrant families, and on cross-cultural supervision and consultation. She is a member of the Culture Consortium of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. She has contributed to the literature of infant mental health and
culturally/diversity informed services.
Karen A. Frankel, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and the Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University Of Colorado School Of Medicine. She is currently the Director of the Harris Program in Child Development and Infant Mental Health and supervising psychologist for the University of Colorado Hospital Outpatient Young Child Clinic and community-based Early Childhood Intensive Family Therapy Team. She serves as the Executive Director for Fussy Baby Network Colorado. Dr. Frankel is a national trainer for the Diagnostic Classification for Infants and Young Children and part of the Harris Professional Development Networks Tenets Task Force.
Details
October 31, 2014; 9:00am-3:00pm (Breakfast and networking will begin at 8:15am)
Department of Transportation, 4201 E Arkansas Ave, Denver, CO 80222- FREE parking!
Light Breakfast and Lunch provided
Cost: $100 for CoAIMH members, $125 for non-members (please email tiffany.coaimh@gmail.com if you would like to ensure your membership is current or to become a member)
**Please note: In the event of a cancellation, notification must be received at michelle.roy@mhcd.org by 5pm on October 24, 2014 for refund of cost. After this time, we will be unable to process a refund.