Cultivating ethics consultation: commentary on "The development of a clinical ethics consultation service in a community hospital

Conclusion: Simpson's article [in this issue, p. 124-130] provides us with needed data about the development and utilization of an ethics consultation service in a community hospital. It makes clear, however, how much further we have to go in developing guiding standards for practitioners and institutions. We need to learn much more about the effectiveness of ethics consultation in meeting well-defined goals and producing desired processes and outcomes before standards for credentials and accountability have a sound empirical basis.     

Pastoral consultation through a community Mental Health Center

Conclusion Pastoral consultation through a mental health center in Kansas has been a beneficial experience for participating clergymen and the mental health center staff. This consultation has provided interested clergymen an opportunity to learn effective ways of serving parishioners through the church. The clergymen and mental health center staff have also begun to realize the mental health implications of religious resources, as well as ways in which ministers and the mental health center staff can effectively work together in serving troubled individuals within the local community. Pastoral consultation may become a means through which other community mental health centers and local clergymen can form meaningful professional relationships. The continuance of a pastoral consultation program over a longer period of time is needed to determine its possibilities and liabilities for assistingA report of one aspect of a special study project on Community Clergy and Mental Health, made possible by a grant from W. Clement Stone to the Menninger Foundation.     

Intensive family intervention in a community consultation framework

This article describes a form of mental health consultation to community workers who have reached a state of crisis in their work with unmotivated, multi-problem families. The central part of the consultation is a therapeutic intervention that draws on principles of time extension and network intervention. The consultant sees the family together with its community workers in a one-time, intensive meeting of up to six hours duration. This meeting is divided into three phases, aimed at achieving respectively (1) structural, (2) emotional, and (3) cognitive imbalancing of the family system. This creates a new situation, which hopefully will enable the community workers and the family to move out of the crisis in which they had become stuck.