Child Mental Health Internship

Child Mental Health

The ages of the children I worked with at my internship were 2-11. Every child I worked with had some type of special need. From ADHD to Cerebral Palsy. Child Mental Health is of the classes I reflect on most in my internship. A large part of Child Mental Health focused on was different types of attachment. It is important that children with special needs form a secure attachment. At UCP I saw a variety of children with different types of attachment. In Child Mental Health I learned exactly what attachment is. I also learned, that children benefit from positive attachment from people other than their parents. This was something that I kept in mind during my internship. I knew that some of the children I worked with

Nothing could have ever prepared me for the amount of paperwork I was going to have to do during my internship. From billing sheets, to time sheets, to billing with a client every 15 minutes for 9 hours. It was extremely important that I had adequate time management skills and I was able to support my client and find some balance so I could still manage to remain caught up on my paperwork for the day. I also worked in three separate departments at UCP, RCS, Bridges (the daycare for special needs children), and ESDM (Early Start Denver Model). So keeping which paperwork went in which area in order was very important. I also had to plan for what I was going to do with my client each session so it was beneficial to their objectives. If I didn’t plan, I wouldn’t be able to come up with beneficial ideas for the session which would make it challenging to have profitable work with my client. In Assessment and Planning we also learned about the testing or assessments done with individual who receive some type of services. And at UCP children received specific testing to determine their need or where they were

Structured, unstructured, and semi-structured are the different types. Many of the families I encountered during my internship had had some type of interview. The families that entered UCP all took part in some type of structured or semi-structured interview to asses the needs of the individual child. Aside from UCP there are many other assessments that can potentially be done for children and adolescents. Such as suicide assessments, depression, and substance abuse. Most of the children I worked with didn’t have to be assessed in any of those areas. But, much of the time the parents of the children I worked with struggled with those issues and needed to be