Hello.
My name is Doctor.
Harvey Payne, and I'm the academic dean for the School of Counseling at Divine Mercy University.
In the School of Counseling, we have a number of courses that build on each other, that help our students work with children and adolescents.
One of the foundational courses is human growth and development.
Just understanding what normal growth and development looks like compared to children who are having difficulties and struggles.
And the course on top of that if you will is a developmental psychopathology course, which looks at how is it that children, adolescents develop different psychiatric difficulties.
They then take a course on actual diagnosis and treatment planning, which looks at how to make those kinds of distinctions among children, adolescents, and adults as to what's typical, what's not typical, what is perhaps a sign or symptom of some type of clinical diagnosis.
And then we actually sort of pull all that together in our course on counseling children and adolescents.
And we walk them through a very systematic standardized format of assessing children, and to understand how this child is doing compared to other children the child's age to find out what might be going on and to use that to apply everything else that they have learned and figuring out what's happening with the child.