An Integrative Approach to Clinical Social Work Practice with Children of Incarcerated Parents - A Clinician's Guide

This book is an essential clinician's guide to understanding, unpacking, treating, and healing individual, familial, and communal wounds associated with parental incarceration. Readers gain familiarity with integrative micro and macro healing techniques and modalities that are currently being utilized as anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and innovative practices. They also develop an understanding of and deeper unpacking of their own biases within the therapeutic relationship. 

The book offers an extensive overview of clinical practice models such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, and relational and attachment-based therapy for treating trauma symptoms associated with children of incarcerated parents, their families, and their surrounding communities. The author provides guidance on healing complex trauma through phase-oriented, multimodal, and skill-focused treatment approaches, with emphasis on strengthening one's own narrative of power and pain while building community in supportive spaces. Among the topics covered:

• Why Criminal Justice Is Relevant to All Clinical Practitioners
• Impact of Secondary Incarceration: Collateral Consequences for Children and Families
• Psychosocial Stressors for Children of Incarcerated Parents: Conspiracy of Silence and Ambiguous Loss
• Supervision and the Therapeutic Alliance: Critical Consciousness and Anti-racist Clinical Training and Undoing
• Clinical Partnership: Application of Dismantling Anti-Blackness Through Anti-oppressive Practice and Critical Consciousness

An Integrative Approach to Clinical Social Work Practice with Children of Incarcerated Parents enhances therapeutic relationships for social workers, teaches innovative clinical practices most effective for this population, and offers a comprehensive discussion and understanding of the complex traumas faced both historically and presently by children and families impacted by the criminal justice system. Although designed to inspire and train social workers, the guide has significantly wide-ranging application for mental health and medical providers and other clinicians interested in enhancing their work with children and families impacted by the criminal justice system in diverse clinical practice settings. Lay practitioners and policymakers within government and not-for-profit settings also will find the book of interest.

Anna Morgan-Mullane, LCSW-R, was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, USA, where she first found her love of community organizing rooted in her family values, with two parents who worked in spaces impacted by injustice. Dr. Morgan-Mullane obtained her Master's in Social Work from Fordham University and her Doctorate in Social Welfare from NYU Silver School of Social Work. After 18 years living and working within her community of Brooklyn, New York, she serves as President of Mental Health Services at Children of Promise, NYC for 12 years and the President of Clinical Policies and Practices to Fresh Youth Initiatives in New York. Dr. Morgan-Mullane conducts an extensive training program for MSW and MHC interns, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Licensed Mental Health Counselors, psychiatrists, and licensed creative art therapists that allows everyone to gain anti-racist and critical culturally responsive therapeutic skills needed to support individuals, families, and communities impacted by the injustice system, complex trauma, and intergenerational trauma. In 2012, Dr. Morgan-Mullane and Sharon Content successfully established the first outpatient mental health clinic in the United States specifically designed to address the experiences and narratives of children and adolescents impacted by hyper-incarceration. Dr. Morgan-Mullane has also developed clinical policies and practice guidelines and launched an evidence-informed treatment model which includes the employment of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, complex trauma systems theory, and Mitigation Practices. Dr. Morgan-Mullane's work explores the intersection of clinical social work, social policy, and systemic racism within all injustice systems. Dr. Morgan-Mullane is an adjunct professor in the NYU Silver School of Social Work and Simmons University, where she teaches in their several courses in their Master's and Doctoral programs which she developed on the intersectionality of clinical policy and practice within injustice reform and abolition and mental health implications for those impacted by systemic oppression. Dr. Morgan-Mullane has presented her research over the last 15 years at the National NASW conference in Washington D.C., NASW-NYC, Third and Fourth Annual CE Conferences, and at the Global Prison Conference in South Africa at the University of Johannesburg. Anna identifies proudly as an individual, therapeutic, and community abolitionist, as she believes the only way toward true healing will be through the reimagining of all mental health care systems globally.