Adaptation of the Preventive Intervention Program for Depression for Use with Predominantly Low-Income Latino Families

This paper describes the process for and safety/feasibility of adapting the Beardslee Preventive Intervention Program for Depression for use with predominantly low income, Latino families. Utilizing a Stage I model for protocol development, the adaptation involved literature review, focus groups, pilot testing of the adapted manual, and open trial of the adapted intervention with 9 families experiencing maternal depression. Adaptations included conducting the intervention in either Spanish or English, expanding the intervention to include the contextual experience of Latino families in the United States with special attention to cultural metaphors, and using a strength-based, family-centered approach. The families completed preintervention measures for maternal depression, child behavioral difficulties, global functioning, life stresses, and an interview that included questions about acculturative stressors, resiliency, and family awareness of parental depression. The postintervention interview focused on satisfaction, distress, benefits of the adapted intervention, and therapeutic alliance. The results revealed that the adaptation was nonstressful, perceived as helpful by family members, had effects that seem to be similar to the original intervention, and the preventionists could maintain fidelity to the revised manual. The therapeutic alliance with the preventionists was experienced as quite positive by the mothers. A case example illustrates how the intervention was adapted.     

Collaborative Helping: A Practice Framework for Family-Centered Services

This article offers a framework for collaborative family-centered practice that can reinvigorate our work with families who have not responded to more traditional approaches. Collaborative Helping is grounded in family-centered principles that include: striving for cultural curiosity, believing in resourcefulness, working in partnership, and making our work more accountable to the clients we serve. The article introduces collaborative inquiry as an organizing metaphor for clinical practice and offers a five-step practice framework with clinical illustrations and sample questions. The framework draws from appreciative inquiry, motivational interviewing, the signs of safety approach to child protection work, and solution-focused and narrative therapies.     

Extending Psychotherapeutic Strategies to People With Disabilities

In the last decade mind-body strategies have evolved to extend possible counseling approaches to persons with disabilities. Using Beatrice A. Wright's principles of attention to individual needs, respect for situational complexities, and flexibility, the authors reflect on the work of Milton H. Erickson, from which modern mind-body counseling interventions can be traced. Included are strategies to develop rapport, the therapeutic use of imagery, reframing and other paradoxical techniques, and the use of metaphor in counseling with people with disabilities.     

Review of the Comprehensive Assessment Program: Achievement Series

A school's achievement tests influence how students are evaluated by teachers, parents, counselors, and, eventually, the students themselves. Counselors, as a consequence, need to work with different constituencies in the school system to ensure that achievement tests are providing useful information and are being used constructively. For this function, counselors work as members and, perhaps, as leaders of a team. The following article summarizes the process and findings of a school district's evaluation of an achievement test to illustrate a team evaluation and the kind of evidence a team uses in recommending adoption or rejection of a test.