Mental Health Assessment with Children and Adolescents:
A Clinical, Community, and Cultural Framework

Forthcoming in Fall 2025, this textbook offers an accessible and practice-oriented guide to conducting clinical interviews and mental health assessments with children and adolescents. Written for students and emerging professionals in psychology, counseling, social work, and related fields, it walks readers through each stage of the assessment process – from the referral questions through interviewing, testing, report-writing, making recommendations, and providing feedback – while centering culture and context throughout. Grounded in an innovative integration of clinical, cultural, and community psychology, the book equips clinicians to recognize how structural inequities and systemic influences – families, social networks, neighborhoods, schools, communities, societies – shape youth well-being. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all approach, the book provides a flexible, principles-based framework that fosters engagement and collaboration, facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of youth, and generates meaningful and actionable recommendations. Integrated into all sections of the book is an explicit focus on the approaches needed to work with youth and families of diverse cultural backgrounds and in unique settings, such as schools, outpatient practices, health clinics, residential centers, psychiatric hospitals, and legal settings.