Examines wellness promotion and its use in higher education and considers the relationship of illness prevention, history, dimensions, and programing to wellness. Describes specific examples of wellness programs at six universities and suggests the need for further research into the effects of these programs on students. (JAC)

Describes a project with Native American tribes in Louisiana which trains paraprofessionals to provide minimal mental health services for their own people and to gain access to various state agencies. The project was viewed as successful by the trainees and an outside evaluator. (JAC)

Programs that provide support for the health and well-being of school employees are rare. A health promotion program focusing on self-help is discussed in this article. Methods of program development and implementation are presented. Results indicate that school employees can be trained to facilitate a health promotion program in the school…

Summarizes and discusses the implications of a recent national study of public policies affecting the delivery of mental health services to disturbed children and adolescents. Discusses fiscal, administrative, and service inadequacies as well as innovative programming and policy efforts. Addresses implications for the policymaking and…

The article describes and evaluates the pilot Student Health Advocate Program of UCLA, a peer-staffed, general health outreach program designed to provide care for students' minor medical and emotional concerns. (MB)

In the national discussion of mental health problems, in the literature on the subject, minorities seem to have been almost deliberately omitted. The reasons for such omission of blacks, Spanish-speaking people and Indians from literature and mental health practice are discussed. (Author/RK)

This field work examines womens' participation in 50 alternative self-help support systems covering 10 states and notes that variety is the outstanding characteristic of these services. (Author/AM)

Many children served in afterschool programs would be left alone in dangerous neighborhoods, potentially engaging in risky sexual and criminal behaviors, if not for their participation in structured programming. In fact, research has shown that students who spend the majority of their afterschool hours in unsupervised activities are more likely to…

"Data Trends" reports present summaries of research on mental health services for children and adolescents and their families. The article summarized in this "Data Trends" presents the results of a study of 40,636 children entering the Illinois domestic violence service system over a five-year period. The results of this study…

Recent reports have documented how some parents choose to place their children in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems in order to obtain the mental health services that their children need. Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to testify on:…

Launched by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in the early 1990s, Plain Talk is a community-based initiative that seeks to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy and STDs by improving adult/teen communication about sex. A key component of the program is parental involvement--which was once seen by many in the adolescent reproductive health (ARH) field…

Challenge initiatives are used by many mental health agencies to facilitate a variety of therapeutic changes within participants. There are several ways to lead these challenge initiatives, including whole training, fixed training, and adaptive training. This paper presents a theoretical basis for considering adaptive training to be the most…

This study uses a historical perspective to examine the interface of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Department and the Mental Hygiene Administration in their efforts to provide services to youth involved with the juvenile justice system who were found to have mental disorders. A time line was constructed documenting developments from the 16th…

This article highlights the untended mental health needs of children across the United States. Citing troubling mental health statistics, the author suggests creating a community culture that does not stigmatize or ignore mental health problems, specifically by making prevention and treatment the rule. One of the potential stumbling blocks…

This study provides comparative data describing the quality of 1,175 psychological sites currently available on the Internet. A rating scale was used to assess six dimensions of site quality including accuracy, practicality, normalization and sense of belonging, referral, and feedback mechanisms. One-way ANOVA on the six separate quality items and…