State of mind assessments

This paper describes state of mind assessments as undertaken by child psychotherapists. It considers the similarities and differences with an assessment for an ongoing child psychotherapy treatment intervention and is described here as a ‘package’ that is offered to the family, child and young person and also the referring colleague. It is suggested that the consultative aspect has more weight in a state of mind assessment. The stages of the assessment are outlined and include the initial consultation with the referring colleague, a meeting with parents, three sessions with a child or young person and feeding back to parents with further consultation to the referring colleague. The meaning of the request at any particular time is explored and influences the stance and the approach to the assessment by the therapist. A summary of a case example illustrates the different stages outlined here. The thinking and approach described may be particularly useful to trainees and those starting out as child psychotherapists in child and adolescent mental health services.     

Vividness of positive mental imagery predicts positive emotional response to visually presented Project Soothe pictures

Lang's bioinformational theory of mental imagery proposes that mental imagery and external stimuli engage emotional information-processing systems in similar ways. However, the positive and negative systems are thought to be distinct, so this similarity is likely to show a valence-specific effect. Therefore, we hypothesized that an individual's ability to construct vivid positive, but not negative, mental imagery would predict positive emotional responding to positive visual stimuli, independently of depressive symptoms. Our stimuli were pictures collected through Project Soothe for possible use in psychotherapy ( www.projectsoothe.com ); as these pictures were intended to induce soothing emotion, we hypothesized that theoretically linked variables Self-compassion and Self-criticism would also predict positive responding to the stimuli. A total of 214 participants completed an online study including validated questionnaire measures, mental imagery tasks, and a picture-rating exercise. Only Positive Imagery Vividness and Self-compassion were significant predictors of positive responding to the soothing pictures, even controlling for depressive symptoms, and Negative and General Imagery Vividness. These findings support Lang's theory and provide evidence for individual differences in a positive processing tendency shared across mental imagery-based and perceptual representations. As this relationship is distinct from depressive symptoms, future imagery-based psychotherapies might aim to influence this positive processing tendency.     

Book review

Voluntary or involuntary migration and international work patterns have made it necessary for many people to adopt a new country and with it, a new language. Some of these latter-acquisition proficient bilinguals may seek therapy in this country. A small scale qualitative study was conducted, informed by a constructionist epistemology, in order to explore the meanings that participants gave to their experience of working in English with a client or patient who used English, proficiently, as a second language. Interviews were conducted with 10 therapists who had been contacted through counselling and psychotherapy organizations, and professional networks. Results indicated that participants experienced varying degrees of separation and distance from their bilingual clients. They found it necessary to pay extra attention to their clients' communications on all levels in order to make a good connection. An awareness of the underlying psychodynamic implications of bilingualism is helpful for the assessment of bilingual clients, in supervision and training, and in the ongoing work.     

How Do Our Values Inform Ethical Research? A Narrative of Recognizing Colonizing Practices

How do you reconcile tensions between ethical research practice, personal values, and disciplinary values? This article focuses on an ethical challenge involving the engagement of rural Indigenous community members that emerged during my PhD fieldwork. The narrative illustrates the necessity to engage in critical reflexive research practice, a process which saw me respond to my own feelings of “wrong” and “right,” contemplate a distinction between procedural ethics and virtue ethics in community‐based research, explore colonizing research practices, and endeavor to reconcile an instance where the values of community psychology appeared in contest. The “voice” in this narrative is that of the first author; the dual authorship reflects the ongoing collaboration between both authors. When this ethical issue came about, our relationship was one of “student” and “supervisor”; we are now colleagues and friends.     

The descriptive adequacy of qualitative findings

Abstract

This article describes ways of understanding early injuries in the life journey affect the experience of clients in therapy. After introducing Langer's (1951) distinction between discursive and presentational symbolism, I describe the ways that presentational symbolism is used to subsume early life experiences including early traumas. Many clients wind up stuck in early developmental injuries and often have experiences that seem chaotic both to them and their therapists. However, if the therapist can understand the nature of presentation‐ally symbolized experiences, a truly transforming relationship can be created. Clinical examples will be used to illustrate my points.     

The experiences of therapists using a new client‐centred psychometric instrument,PSYCHLOPS (Psychological Outcome Profiles)

PSYCHLOPS (‘Psychological Outcome Profiles’) is a newly developed client‐generated psychometric instrument which can be used as an outcome measure. Uniquely, it asks clients to state their own problems, in their own words. As part of its validation, we used it alongside an existing measure, CORE‐OM (‘Clinical Outcomes Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure’). Based on a qualitative methodology, we report here on the first‐hand experiences of four therapists using both instruments. The key themes that emerged from therapists’ responses were feasibility, validity and usefulness. Both questionnaires were perceived as complementing each other, the qualitative information from PSYCHLOPS balancing the quantitative information from CORE‐OM and that both could contribute to the therapist‐client interaction. The key features of PSYCHLOPS are likely to prove attractive to therapists and should increase acceptance and uptake of outcome measures.     

Piloting ‘Clever Kids’: A randomized-controlled trial assessing feasibility,efficacy, and acceptability of a socioemotional well-being programme for children with dyslexia

Children with dyslexia are at elevated risk of internalizing (emotional) and externalizing (behavioural) problems. Clever Kids is a nine-week socioemotional well-being programme developed specifically for upper primary school children with dyslexia. In a small randomized-controlled trial, we tested the feasibility, efficacy, and acceptability of the Clever Kids programme. ‘Forty children (M_age = 10.45 years, 65% male) with clinically diagnosed dyslexia too part in the study. Children were randomized to either attend Clever Kids (n = 20) or to a wait-list control condition (n = 20). Coping skills, self-esteem, resilience, emotion regulation, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured at pre-programme, post-programme, and at three-month follow-up. Recruitment and retention rates indicate high feasibility for further evaluation of the programme. There was a significant interaction between intervention condition and time for non-productive coping [F(2, 76) = 4.29, p = 0.017, f² = 0.11]. Children who attended Clever Kids significantly reduced their use of non-productive coping strategies, and this was maintained at three-month follow-up assessment. For all other outcomes, the interactions between intervention condition and time were non-significant. The programme appears acceptable to children with dyslexia and their families, but may be improved by further reducing the number of activities involving reading and writing. Clever Kids improved the coping skills of children with dyslexia; however, a larger trial is needed to replicate this finding and investigate whether programme attendance is associated with additional improvements in children’s socioemotional well-being.