Featured School Mental Health Journal

Editor’s Note:  Starting in November 2016, we are going to periodically feature an academic journal devoted to school mental health/school social work research.  For each featured journal, we will also highlight a weekly article under our “Research That Matters” section that we hope school social workers will take and apply to their practice context.  

If you are like I was when I was in my SSW practice (1993-2006), journals aren’t your thing.   When I was out there as a SSW, the last time I read an academic journal was that last semester of grad school before I graduated and got my first SSW job.  Journals were important to our field, I knew, but they were usually hard to get to (being in only academic libraries or behind subscription paywalls online that my district didn’t pay for), and besides, I was busy.

I only returned to reading journals myself when I started my doctoral program in 2003, and it took me awhile to figure out what was available for  a practicing school social worker.  Fortunately, in 2016 there are a number of journals now publishing articles that matter to SSW practice.  As part of the re-launch of SSWN, we are excited to feature these journals, starting with Advances in School Mental Health Promotion  https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rasm20/current

Advances has been published since 2008 by the Clifford Beers Foundation and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and is now published by Taylor and Francis.  According to the publisher’s website:  “Advances in School Mental Health Promotion is essential reading for those with an interest in promoting mental health in schools through global dialogue, collaboration and action. ASMHP publishes empirical and scholarly work that emphasizes the interconnected nature of research, policy, training and practice in the field of school mental health.”  Advances publishes 4 issues a year, and draws submissions from school mental health researchers in the United States and around the world. Past issues have featured articles from school social work researchers Dawn Anderson-Butcher (The Ohio State University), Annahita Ball (University of Buffalo), Andy Frey (University of Louisville),  and Aidyn Iachini (University of South Carolina) (Full disclosure:  I am Associate Editor of the Journal, along with school mental health researchers from the University of Missouri, University of South Carolina, and University of Maryland.)