Preface

“Anything that’s known to any human about what’s healthy should be knowable to every human, so we can be healthy. If humans have discovered something that’s helpful, everyone deserves to know it as soon as they need to. We as a field need to measure ourselves against that, how quickly can we get to that vision? We need to ask ourselves, how do we set up our institutions, the right way, to get things to people who need them.”

Bruce Chorpita, PhD

Open Access to Knowledge

This book came from the idea of how to get things to people, specifically how to get the knowledge of evidence-based practices for child mental health to the people doing the work. And it is not simply sharing knowledge. It is an attempt to make that knowledge actionable. The book is set up for readers to navigate the basics—engagement, assessment, and intervention—with an emphasis on the common elements or active ingredients of those areas. The hope is that this is a book that could be ready at hand, something you will pull off your virtual bookshelf in your practice setting.

Open Access to Knowledge Creation

The book is an open access textbook, and we do not take that term lightly. With openness, we hope to be transparent about the realities that are happening in the field. With accessibility, we hope that anyone can read and reference the book. It was written in the spirit of access; many of the chapter coauthors are first-generation college students and together they represent various racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities. There is accessibility to being an author, and that leads to greater representation in the creation of this book’s knowledge base.

Openness to New Knowledge

This book is a project, too. It was a joy to work with all of the coauthors, clinical dialogue guests, and the many scientific and clinical colleagues across the country on our virtual writing groups. (Thank you, Dr. Alayna Park, for setting those up!) Our work is never finished, and I welcome any feedback from readers to make this book better, more helpful, more open, accessible, and actionable. Everything, really, is iterative.