Product Description This book, specifically designed to meet the needs of those teaching and learning interviewing and diagnostic skills in clinical, counseling and school psychology, counselor education, and other programs preparing mental health professionals, offers a rich array of practical, hands-on, class- and workshop-tested role-playing and didactic exercises. The authors, who bring to their task a combined 31 years of practice and 24 years of teaching these skills, present 20 complex profiles of a broad range of clients--adults, teens, and children; differing in ethnicity, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, presenting problems, and problem severity. The profiles provide students/trainees with a wealth of information about each client's feelings, thoughts, actions, and relationship patterns on which to draw as they proceed through the different phases of the intake/initial interview, one playing the client and one the interviewer. Each client profile is followed by exercises, which can also be assigned to students not participating in role-playing who have simply read the profile. The profiles are detailed enough to support a focus on whatever interviewing skills an instructor particularly values. However, the exercises highlight attending, asking open and closed questions, engaging in reflective listening, responding to nonverbal behavior, making empathetic comments, summarizing, redirecting, supportively confronting, and commenting on process. The authors' approach to DSM-IV diagnoses encourages students to develop their diagnostic choices from Axis I to Axis V and then thoughtfully review them in reverse order from Axis V to Axis I to ensure that the impacts of individual, situational, and biological factors are all accurately reflected in the final diagnoses. Throughout, the authors emphasize the importance of understanding diversity and respecting the client's perceptions--and of reflecting on the ways in which the interviewer's own identity influences both the process of interviewing and that of diagnosis. Interviewing and Diagnostic Exercises for Clinical and Counseling Skills Building will be welcomed as a invaluable new resource by instructors, students, and trainees alike. Review Advance praise... "Through rich and compelling case profiles, Berman and Shopland's unique text is likely to fully engage the fledgling clinician in the process of acquiring essential interviewing skills. Classroom use of the thought-provoking exercises they've devised is likely to invigorate class atmosphere, making it an effective workplace for skill mastery. This text is unlike others in that diversity is not an afterthought; it requires students to take into account the differences among individuals at the beginning of the diagnostic enterprise."—Virginia Brabender, Ph.D.Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University