Radical Visionaries – Feminist Psychotherapists: 1970–1975

ABSTRACT

The work of feminist scholars, activists, therapists, and theorists has continuously impacted the United States and international cultural narrative since the radical days of the 1960s and 1970s. This special issue was created to highlight contributors to this remarkable transformation by documenting the narratives of their lives and careers. These profiles, nearly all written by or with the pioneers themselves, highlight their contributions to feminism, feminist psychology, and the vast societal change that followed their work.     

Feminist Pioneer: Annette Brodsky Paving the Way

ABSTRACT

Even when the culture imposed stringent limitations on women’s roles, Dr. Annette Brodsky refused to succumb to these restrictions. As one of only a few women in her graduate school cohort, she broke new ground during her pre-doctoral internship, her post-internship military placement, and in her faculty position at the University of Alabama. Her renowned work advocating for and studying the effect of consciousness-raising groups engendered critical scholarship that revealed the harm of therapists’ sexual abuse and facilitated improved ethics and guidelines for psychologists in their work with clients. Dr. Brodsky has served as a pioneering feminist psychologist for several generations of women.     

Impact of Worry on Career Thoughts,Career Decision State,and Cognitive Information Processing Skills

Sixty-nine Amazon Mechanical Turk workers completed the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Berle et al., 2011), the Career Thoughts Inventory (Sampson et al., 1996a), and the Career State Inventory (Leierer et al., 2017). Worry was significantly correlated with negative career thinking and its dimensions of decision-making confusion and commitment anxiety, with readiness and its dimensions of clarity and certainty, and with the self-assessed cognitive information processing skills of self-knowledge, options knowledge, decision-making, and executive processing. Worry was also found to predict the degree of readiness for career decision-making, negative career thinking, and cognitive information processing requisite skills.     

Peer victimization through a trauma lens: Identifying who is at risk for negative outcomes

Peer victimization is a chronic stressor that occurs within the context of peer interactions and has been robustly associated with numerous negative psychological and social adjustment problems. Although increased frequency of peer victimization has been linked to psychosocial problems, few researchers have studied the role of duration and pervasiveness of victimization (i.e., number of places it occurs). The objective of this study was to examine how frequency, duration, and pervasiveness of peer victimization are associated with youth adjustment. Canadian adolescents (N = 879), ages 12–18 completed an online survey about experiences with peer victimization. Youth also answered questions about internalizing problems, distress, relationship quality with family, friends, and adults in their school and community, as well as academic functioning. Data were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression modeling. Both duration and pervasiveness of peer victimization were predictive of increased internalizing problems, distress, relationship problems, and academic difficulties. Duration and pervasiveness of peer victimization were identified as important factors to consider when predicting youth psychosocial adjustment. By asking questions about these situational factors, parents, teachers, and healthcare providers may more effectively identify youth who are at risk for experiencing mental health problems associated with peer victimization.     

Parenting after Weight Loss Surgery: A Conceptual Model and Two Case Reports

The ways families approach eating, shape, and weight can result in stress for individual family members and challenge the overall functioning of the family. This is further complicated among families with a parent who has history of obesity or undergone weight loss surgery (WLS). Although WLS can positively impact other family members, it can also exacerbate conflicts regarding feeding and weight. Such conflicts can involve uncertainty regarding the extent to which the entire family should make the dietary changes recommended for the post-WLS parent. Conflict might also center on the appropriate level of concern regarding the children’s risk of developing (or maintaining) obesity. This paper uses two case examples to describe the application of a specialized, time-limited intervention: Parent-Based Prevention following Bariatric Surgery (PBP-B). The program was developed to address the unique challenges and concerns that arise after, or are exacerbated by, WLS. Each detailed case example illustrates a common child-feeding challenge and the employment of key PBP-B strategies throughout the course of treatment. In the first case, the parent who had undergone WLS believed the family’s current eating behaviors were the same as those that had led to her own overeating, obesity, and co-occurring psychiatric symptoms, while her husband disagreed. In the second case, both parents were concerned about their son’s weight, yet due to their prior eating histories, they felt unable to construct boundaries around the feeding experience. Both cases follow families through the entire intervention and illustrate key points and challenges. These cases underscore the need for novel treatment modalities to support families following parental WLS.     

Standardized Human Pedigree Nomenclature: Update and Assessment of the Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors

In 1995, the Pedigree Standardization Task Force (PSTF) of the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) proposed a system of pedigree nomenclature. Recently, the PSTF (now called the Pedigree Standardization Work Group or PSWG) sought evidence that the published symbols met the needs of health professionals, were incorporated into health professional training and were utilized in publications. We searched PubMed and reference lists of select publications, reviewed the Instructions for Authors of several journals, searched the websites of professional societies, sought comment from the membership of the NSGC, and looked at recommendations and training practices of various health professional organizations. Many journals still do not cite specific standards for pedigrees, but those found cited the PSTF nomenclature. We did not find significant objections or alternatives to the 1995 nomenclature. Based on our review, we propose only a few minor stylistic changes to the pedigree symbols. The pedigree nomenclature of the NSGC is the only consistently acknowledged standard for drawing a family health history. We recommend regular and continued review of these pedigree standards to determine if additional symbols are needed to accommodate changes in clinical practice to ensure that the symbols continue to meet the needs of health professionals and researchers as well as adhere to evolving ethical and privacy standards. All health professionals, trainees, and researchers should be made aware of the utility of using a common pedigree nomenclature in clinical practice and publication. This will become particularly important as electronic medical records become more widely utilized.