A solution-focused approach to working with clients who are suicidal

Self-harm and suicide are amongst the most challenging and frightening problems that therapists and counsellors can encounter in the course of their work. The risk of clients harming themselves in the course of treatment can debilitate the therapists from acting creatively and collaboratively, and make their actions defensive, focused solely on risk assessment rather than therapeutic change.Yet it is precisely a creative and collaborative response, such as that engendered by solution-focused therapy and other models, that is the most likely to facilitate change and re-empower clients to take back charge of their lives. This article describes a solution-focused approach to working with suicidal clients that can be used in conjunction with traditional approaches and which focus on establishing safety as well as assessing risk.Working from this model the clinician shifts to identifying client strengths and coping skills, to collaborating with the client to establish meaningful goals and to helping the client envision a positive future. Arguably, such an approach can increase collaboration between therapist and client and lead to a more client-centred safety plan.     

Information-seeking dialogues: Some of their logical properties

The dialogical games introduced in Jaakko Hintikka, Information-Seeking Dialogues: A Model, (Erkenntnis, vol. 14, 1979) are studied here to answer the question as to what the natural logic or the logic of natural language is. In a natural language certain epistemic elements are not explicitly indicated, but they determine which inference rules are valid. By means of dialogical games, the question is answered: all classical first-order rules have to be modified in the same way in which some of them are modified in the transition to intuitionistic logic. (Furthermore, in some cases quantificational rules have to be modified further.) The rules that are left unmodified by intuitionists are applicable only to the output of certain game rules, but not to others. In. this sense, neither classical nor yet intuitionistic logic is the logic of natural language. We need a new type of nonclassical logic, justified by our information-seeking dialogues.     

Emotional dances: therapeutic dialogues as embodied systems

The mind/body dualism, although scarcely relevant in clinical practice, remains unsolved theoretically. The pragmatic wisdom of the founders of family therapy, which implied that bodies and minds in therapy were one, has been easily forgotten. Such a situation had practical results, leading to naive solutions, both on the materialistic and idealistic sides, represented by biological psychiatry on the one side, and by most postmodern therapies on the other. This article proposes to consider the role of emotions in therapeutic dialogue to solve this dilemma within the field of systemic therapy.     

Correspondence with clients in therapy

Resistance to the therapy process, and the help of the therapist, may sometimes be bypassed or overcome through the substitution of written for verbal communication. Techniques and implications of this procedure are discussed in this paper.     

Clinical relationships with forensic clients: A three-dimensional model

This paper considers the clinical relationship with clients in mandatory treatment. In several countries, clients found guilty of committing a sexual or violent offense (often resulting in a jail sentence) are obliged by law to meet a psychotherapist. This mandatory treatment occurs both during the time in jail and in the community. The clinical relationship with these clients is a complex process involving the therapist, the client, and the courts. In this paper we describe some common factors that can facilitate or hinder the therapist's work in this situation.     

Psychological test usage with adolescent clients: survey update

In 1991, Archer, Maruish, Imhof, and Piotrowski presented survey findings based on the responses of a national sample of psychologists who performed psychological assessment with adolescent clients. The current survey was designed to update their results by examining the test use practices reported by 346 psychologists who work with adolescents in a variety of clinical and academic settings. These respondents represented an adjusted survey return rate of 36% and predominantly consisted of doctoral prepared psychologists (95%) in private practice settings (51%). The survey respondents had a mean of 13.6 years of post-degree clinical experience, and spent an average of 45% of their clinical time working with adolescents. Survey results reveal a substantial similarity in test usage between the 1991 survey and the current investigation. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scales, Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) remain among the widely used tests with adolescents. However, several changes were also noted including a reduction in the use of the Bender-Gestalt and increases in the use of parent and teacher rating instruments. The current findings are used to estimate the relative popularity of an extensive list of test instruments, compare current findings to 1991 survey results, and to examine several issues related to general effects of managed care procedures and policies on test usage with adolescents.     

Couples therapy with gay clients: Issues facing counsellors

Couples therapy is widely practised by a range of different counselling professionals, but, as yet, concentrates on heterosexual clients, to the exclusion of gay people. This paper argues that couples therapy should be more readily available for gay clients. A review of the major issues which need to be addressed by counsellors before embarking on couples therapy with gay men is presented, with illustrative case material. It is concluded that established forms of intervention are effective with gay clients, providing that the specific needs and problems of the gay community are recognized by the counsellor.     

Groups of individuals who are moderately mentally retarded sharing their activities with passive low-functioning companions

This study involves a program in which two groups of individuals with moderate mental retardation served as peer caregivers with two passive companions (trainees). The main question was whether each group would learn to plan and share daily activities with one trainee, increasing the trainee's activity level. Other questions were: (1) whether peer caregivers would enjoy working with the trainees; (2) whether the job of peer caregiver would occasion social/adaptive behaviors not usually observed in the peer caregivers' repertoire; and (3) whether staff would perceive program effects on peer caregivers' and trainees' behavior. Results showed that the groups of peer caregivers learned to perform independently and accurately, increasing and maintaining the activity of the trainees. Peer caregivers seemed to like (or at least not to mind) working with the trainees, and their job brought about social/adaptive behaviors not commonly seen in their repertoire. Staff ratings confirmed that the program had positive effects on trainees and peer caregivers. General implications of the findings are discussed.     

It's not only clients: Studying emotion work with clients and co‐workers with an event‐sampling approach

A group of 78 young employees in service and non‐service professions reported 848 task related interactions at work over 1 week using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record which measured emotion work requirements, emotional dissonance, and deviance. Multi‐level analyses showed that dissonance was more likely in interactions with customers, whereas deviance, that is, the violation of display rules by acting out one's felt emotion, was more likely in co‐worker interactions. Well‐being in the interaction was lower (a) for interactions with emotion work requirements, (b) for dissonance, even after controlling for felt negative emotions, and (c) for deviance. Negative emotion displayed partially mediated the relationship between deviance and well‐being. Regarding the relationship of more stable job related attitudes, psychosomatic complaints, and aggregated scores of social interactions, fewer effects were found than in questionnaire studies, which may be due to the fact that only interactions that lasted at least 10 minutes were assessed, as is customary in research with this instrument. Among the effects found, however, many involved proportions rather than frequency of interactions, which raises the possibility of balancing and legitimizing effects of non‐stressful interactions.     

Using epistemic ratios to evaluate hypotheses: an imprecision penalty for imprecise hypotheses

According to Bayesians, the null hypothesis significance-testing procedure is not deductively valid because it involves the retention or rejection of the null hypothesis under conditions where the posterior probability of that hypothesis is not known. Other criticisms are that this procedure is pointless and encourages imprecise hypotheses. However, according to non-Bayesians, there is no way of assigning a prior probability to the null hypothesis, and so Bayesian statistics do not work either. Consequently, no procedure has been accepted by both groups as providing a compelling reason to accept or reject hypotheses. The author aims to provide such a method. In the process, the author distinguishes between probability and epistemic estimation and argues that, although both are important in a science that is not completely deterministic, epistemic estimation is most relevant for hypothesis testing. Based on this analysis, the author proposes that hypotheses be evaluated via epistemic ratios and explores the implications of this proposal. One implication is that it is possible to encourage precise theorizing by imposing a penalty for imprecise hypotheses.     

Analysing user's reactions in advice-giving dialogues with a socially intelligent ECA

In this paper, we investigate the user's reactions to received suggestion by an Embodied Conversational Agent playing the role of artificial therapist in the healthy eating domain. Specifically, we analyse the behaviour of people who voluntarily requested to receive information from the agent, and we compare it with the results of a previous evaluation experiment in which subjects were not properly motivated to interact with the agent because they were selected for evaluating the system. This study is part of an ongoing research aimed at developing an intelligent virtual agent that applies natural argumentation techniques to persuade the users to improve their eating habits.     

Some Psychological Hypotheses on Nazi Germany: III

Summary

The relation between room size and interpersonal distance as manifested in a seated conversation, as well as the effects of the sex and relative status of the speakers upon this distance, are examined. Subjects (n = 80) were asked to interact singly with one of 12 confederates in varying combinations of room size, status, and sex conditions. As predicted, the size of this interpersonal distance was inversely related to room size. A perceptual-behavioral threshold for room size was suggested, as it was also noted that the distance scores in the small room were distributed bimodally as opposed to the unimodal scores in the large room. Neither status nor sex was found to affect interpersonal distance consistently.