2010 Essay Competition Winner: Transformation at a community mental health centre (original) (raw)
Related papers
Transcending polarities: counsellors' and psychotherapists' experiences of transformation
2014
The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own, except where work which has formed part of jointly authored publications has been included. The contribution of the candidate and the other authors to this work has been explicitly indicated below. The candidate confirms that appropriate credit has been given within the thesis where reference has been made to the work of others.
The experience of therapeutic change for psychologists preparing to become psychotherapists
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2012
The present study aims to reveal the experience of therapeutical change and importance of emotional, experiential learning for a future psychotherapist. There are two research questions: how do psychologists preparing to become psychotherapists experience and make sense of therapeutical change, and how do they experience and make sense of the group experience. The study is of qualitative nature using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a research method and Psychodrama group therapy as an intervention method. Findings show a clear progress towards a more authentic and stronger self. Personal therapy is recommended as an essential component of a psychotherapy training program.
Psychotherapeutic Subjectivities Conclusion
The present dissertation is a qualitative inquiry into the differences in experiences of change in distinct, or even contrary, modalities of psychotherapy—Psychoanalysis (PSA)/Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (PDT) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). As such, the investigation speaks to the actual effects of a given therapeutic approach in the words and narratives of the patients/analysands/clients. The very intention of such research crosses a number of theoretic debates within clinical psychology that have dogged the therapeutic field and show no signs of abatement any time soon. This research aimed to apply the results derived from empirical data regarding the above psychotherapy modalities to the question of Specific Factors vs. Common Factors and attempted to delineate the impact of interventions in what, as is shown below, must be understood in a Contextual model of psychotherapy that allows for a more nuanced consideration of differences in therapeutic relationships. What I conclude from my data indicates that a Contextual model, specifically that proposed by Butler and Strupp, supersedes the Specific Factors vs. Common Factors dichotomy in its explanatory value for understanding processes of therapeutic change.
Soul of an Agency: Psychodynamic Principles in Action in the World of Community Mental Health
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2014
Community mental health has undergone a number of evolutions since Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty and gave birth to the community mental health movement. This paper describes a philosophy of treatment involving long-term psychotherapy to resistant and multiple problem families in disadvantaged communities. The agency's primary philosophy is described as a psychoanalytic frame that guides treatment from a secure attachment site (clinic) in the community. The interventions use home and community based therapists with supports from psychiatry, psychology, and therapeutic mentoring. The focus of all treatment is for high-risk families to remain in the community and not burden corrections, courts, child welfare, or juvenile justice systems. Therapy forms the connection that can help families navigate schools, medical providers, courts, and social service systems. The agency forms the positive attachment site; clinicians come and go. The net effect is sustained connection to families that would have otherwise been broken apart by domestic violence, school crimes, addiction, gangs, poverty, homelessness, and community violence.
Teaching and transformation: A psychoanalytic perspective on psychotherapeutic training
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2009
While there has been much recent interest in the impact of organizational structures underpinning psychotherapeutic training (e.g. Davies 2008; Kernberg 2006), there has been curiously little interest in the impact of interpersonal dynamics on the process of teaching psychotherapy. In this paper, I draw on my experience as a university lecturer and tutor on a postgraduate counselling and psychotherapy training programme to explore some of the unconscious dynamics underpinning the psychotherapy trainee’s development towards a mature professional identity. The implicit expectations that trainee psychotherapists hold at the start of their training are initially discussed; I then turn to psychoanalytic writers such as Bollas, Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin in an attempt to articulate and explore how trainees may progress from relating, to constructive use of their tutors in their quest for personal transformation and professional recognition.
2017
This thesis addresses the complicated nature of the psychotherapeutic alliance, by attempting to deconstruct what is already in practice. In piecing out the different aspects of the relationship between psychotherapist and client, and referring back to relevant literature, one can understand better the dynamics that exist within the therapeutic encounter. In the process, one can also see how the different principles of different psychotherapy schools fit into what we understand today as the profession of psychotherapy. Considered a profession, psychotherapy is bound to ethics, within which is the question of competence and accountability. The importance of understanding what really happens in a client-therapist meeting that is unique to psychotherapy, and that which leads to therapeutic change, is emphasized in this paper, with case studies from classical texts and referred back to modern day change-process research.
Engaging with Transformative Paradigms in Mental Health
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
When graduates of Australian social work courses embark on a career in mental health, the systems they enter are complex, fragmented and evolving. Emerging practitioners will commonly be confronted by the loneliness, social exclusion, poverty and prejudice experienced by people living with mental distress; however, social work practice may not be focused on these factors. Instead, in accordance with the dominant biomedical perspective, symptom and risk management may predominate. Frustration with the limitations evident in this approach has seen the United Nations call for the transformation of mental health service delivery. Recognising paradigmatic influences on mental health social work may lead to a more considered enactment of person centred, recovery and rights-based approaches. This paper compares and contrasts influences of neo-liberalism, critical theory, human rights and post-structuralism on mental health social work practice. In preparing social work practitioners to rec...
An intervention in a Mental Health Centre.
Rivista di Psicologia Clinica n. 1 , 2006
"We will present the report of an intervention carried out for a Mental Health Centre (CSM), in anItalian town of more than one million inhabitants. Some comments on the development of the Mental Health Services in Italy, in the last thirty years, will precede the report of the case. The same clinical psychology categories used in analyses of organizational relationships, adopted to outline this process, will be later used to present the report on the intervention in the CSM These introductory remarks on the Mental Health Services development will be useful for those who are unfamiliar with t he specific Italian situation. In more general terms, however, we think it is always useful to sum up the characteristics of the context in which the psychologist intervenes. In fact, we adopt an approach to the intervention that involves a profound knowledge of the context where the intervention is realized by bringing together methodology and context, in a close connection. We will explain what a report is, in our view, and why the intervention in the CSM is an intervention of clinical psychology. In our opinion, every intervention that uses as its tool the relationship between the psychologist and his client, is a clinical psychology intervention. As for the report, for the clinical psychologist, reporting constantly about what happens during his work is the best way to manage and assess the intervention itself. The report, useful both to the work - staff and to the client, is written starting from the reading of a client’s demand, and proceeding towards the project, its realization and appraisal. We will put forward here, with the report of the intervention in the CSM in a context of scientific debate, the last draft of the report we used to carry out the intervention and its evaluation. It will be possible to see that while the relationship between the psychologist and his client is being reported, it is also being constructed, with the use of clinical psychology categories. As it is a report written after the conclusion of the intervention, today we will use it above all in its role of appraisal."
Meaning and Change in Psychotherapy
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2011
Starting from two accounts of psychological change in therapeutic settings, based respectively on the analysis of metaphors (Faccio et al. 2011, this issue) and on transformative moments in self narratives (Ribeiro and Gonçalves 2011, this issue), this paper examines core processes of psychological change. Drawing on sociocultural psychology, the paper first argues that core processes of change in such therapeutic settings take place at the level of the organization of a person's semiotic sets. Second, the paper suggests that such therapeutic frames are likely to provoke changes in other aspects of a person's life as these aim at transforming the persons thinking capacities, and as these have as objects situations external to them.