Integrating Narrative Family Therapy in an Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare Program: A Case Study

Adolescent mental health is a significant societal concern in the United States. Diagnosable mental health disorders have been reported at rates of 10–20 % among children and adolescents and this does not include adolescents experiencing personal and interpersonal distress not meeting diagnostic criteria. Adolescents who do not respond to traditional mental health services are often placed in residential treatment centers or other out-of-home treatment programs. Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare (OBH) is growing as a viable treatment option for adolescents who struggle with emotional, behavioral or substance related problems; however, questions have been raised about how to integrate the family into an OBH treatment setting. This article describes a case study illustrating how techniques from Narrative Family Therapy can be used to accomplish this integration, and offers a view of using Narrative Family Therapy to further involve families in the treatment and post-treatment process in an OBH program.     

Aqua vitae,aqua permanens: dreaming,drowning, swimming and surfing in analysis

In response to the question ‘Who is My Jung?’, this paper describes the profound personal impact of Jung's creative / artistic approach to the unconscious, beginning with my discovery of The Red Book at the age of twelve. Echoing the flow of my own dream‐life, I trace the course of two analyses through the alchemical process of solutio, which began with numinous dreams of tidal waves and plunged us into inter‐ and intra‐psychic analytic relationships that evoked vestigial memories of our first aquatic world in utero.     

Explaining the effects of a decision intervention on mammography intentions: The roles of worry,fear and perceived susceptibility to breast cancer

Objective: This study examines the effects of a mammography decision intervention on perceived susceptibility to breast cancer (PSBC) and emotion and investigates how these outcomes predict mammography intentions.

Design: Randomised between-subjects online experiment. Participants were stratified into two levels of risk. Within each stratum, conditions included a basic information condition and six decision intervention conditions that included personalised risk estimates and varied according to a 2 (amount of information: brief vs. extended) × 3 (format: expository vs. untailored exemplar vs. tailored exemplar) design. Participants included 2465 US women ages 35–49.

Main Outcome Measures: PSBC as a percentage, PSBC as a frequency, worry, fear and mammography intentions.

Results: The intervention resulted in significant reductions in PSBC as a percentage for women in both strata and significant increases in worry and fear for women in the upper risk stratum. Of the possible mediators examined, only PSBC as a percentage was a consistent mediator of the effect of the intervention on mammography intentions.

Conclusion: The results provide insight into the mechanism of action of the intervention by showing that PSBC mediated the effects of the intervention on mammography intentions.     

Coercion in Groups: Finding One's Voice; Knowing One's Mind

Groups develop standards to facilitate their function and yet the standards that evolve are not always in line with the explicit task of the group. Group pressures and anxieties can move towards relief of strain in ways that may actually oppose the group's intended goals. The larger the group, the more difficult it may be to catch hold of relatively invisible coercive forces that guide behaviour. As Bion (1977 Bion, W. R. 1977. Seven Servants, New York: Jason Aronson.  [Google Scholar]) notes, group pressures tend to move towards cohesion and tradition, and away from the new idea that ultimately might be productive but would also be disregulating. Although clinicians learn about tensions between the individual and the group from a theoretical perspective, engaging with these tensions actively and reflectively can enhance both our understanding and our practice, as we discover ways in which we are buffeted by and at times succumb to these same processes. As a way of considering some of the more subtle ways in which we may find ourselves behaving out of line with our own integrity in relation to encounters with implicit group demands, I will use some of my own experiences in a group setting to highlight and illustrate some of these coercive forces that may work against the integration of new ideas in group settings.     

Forgiveness intervention for female South Korean adolescent aggressive victims

We investigated an intervention designed to help female aggressive victims improve their levels of psychological and school adjustment. Adolescent aggressive victims are youth who demonstrate heightened levels of aggressive behavior and are frequently victimized by others. A program focused on the psychology of forgiveness was implemented and tested against both an alternative skillstreaming program and a no-treatment control group. Forty-eight female adolescent aggressive victims in South Korea (age 12 to 21 years) were recruited from a middle school and a juvenile correctional facility. Participants were randomly assigned to groups. Both forgiveness and skillstreaming interventions were implemented in a small-group format for 12 weeks. Participants in the forgiveness group reported significant decreases in anger, hostile attribution, aggression, and delinquency at post-test and follow-up; they also reported significant increases in empathy at post-test and follow-up and grades at post-test. We discuss implications for the psychological development of adolescent aggressive victims.     

Approaching Homelessness: An Integral Re-Frame

This article explores a metaview of the many faces of homelessness. It analyzes an evolutionary meaning of home and suggests that ever-complexifying life conditions influence how societies enforce conformity to the status quo of homefulness. It goes on to describe how homelessness might be reframed as a complex adaptive form of survival for diversity generators who cannot or will not conform to the status quo. The article proposes an integral framework on which intervention strategies could be structured to provide evolutionary, appropriate, and flexible approaches to homelessness.     

Aging and Working Memory Inside and Outside the Focus of Attention: Dissociations of Availability and Accessibility

ABSTRACT

Two experiments used the N-Back task to test for age differences in working memory inside and outside the focus of attention. Manipulations of the difficulty of item-context binding (Experiment 1) and of stimulus feature binding (Experiment 2) were used to create conditions that varied in their demand on working memory, with the expectation that greater demand might increase age differences in focus-switching costs and the search rate outside the focus of attention. Results showed, however, that although age differences were evident in measures of overall speed and accuracy, and the manipulations significantly affected response times and accuracy in the expected direction, the experimental manipulations had no impact on age differences. Findings instead pointed to age-related reductions in accuracy but not speed of focus-switching and search outside the focus of attention. Thus, age-related deficits appear to involve the availability of representations in working memory, but not their accessibility.     

Message Valence,Familiarity, Sex,and Personality Effects on the Perceptual Distortion of Height

The perceptual distortion of height was examined in a group of American male and female college student volunteers (n = 139). A message which announced either good or bad news was delivered by a familiar or unfamiliar person who was either male or female. After hearing the message, the students were asked to estimate the height of the communicator. Additionally, the variables of self-esteem and independence of judgment were measured. Results indicated that familiarity with the message source (p <.0025) as well as sex of the communicator (p <.024) were predictors of the perceptual distortion of height, but message valence was not. Neither self-esteem nor independence of judgment was functionally related to the proclivity to distort the heights of the communicators.