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CHAPTER 15 Psychoeducational Models: Teaching Skills to Specific…
CHAPTER 15 Psychoeducational Models: Teaching Skills to Specific Populations
Psychoeducation vs. Psychotherapy
293. Psychoeducational family therapy emphasizes interpersonal skills building, a technique especially suited for dysfunctional families. Can you think of a family you know where such an approach would be the treatment of choice? Identify their problem and state your reasons for why psychoeducation might help them.
294. You visit your therapist and notice a manual on her desk from which she has been working with you and your family. What is your reaction? Explain why.
295. Following up the previous question, suppose you discover that your therapist has written the manual with a group of other professionals. Does that change your attitude?
296. One result of chronic mental illness may be seen in the streets of our cities. Where are the families of these homeless people? How would you address the problem of mentally ill homeless men and women?
297. Have you known a family where a member has been diagnosed with a chronic mental illness such as schizophrenia? What did you observe about family functioning?
298. Is your family a high EE (Expressed Emotion) family or a low EE family? If high, is the emotional expressiveness characterized by critical language? Describe and discuss the effects on you growing up.
299. Is it possible your family might seek psychoeducational help but not psychotherapy? Discuss.
300. Many family therapists affiliate themselves either with systems approaches or postmodern/narrative-oriented therapy. As a clinician, how would you feel about using psychoeducational approaches that tend to rely on empirical studies and research that systems and especially postmodernist practitioners tend to reject? Are these approaches necessarily contradictory? Explain.
301. If you embrace postmodern approaches to family therapy how would you feel if you read that ten empirically based studies show that depression can be successfully managed by applying specific research-proven techniques? Would you change your own postmodern approach? Why or why not?
Medical Family Therapy
302. Has there been a medical problem that affected the life of a member of your family? What kind of help of a psychological nature might have helped the family? The afflicted person? What kind of help did the family actually receive? Did it help? Explain.
303. Medical family therapy is an interdisciplinary team approach. From your perspective, what would be the pros and cons of this approach?
304. According to the text, “no biomedical event occurs without psychosocial consequences.” Discuss this statement in reference to an experience in your family.
305. How do you imagine you would feel as a therapist working with a medical team? Explain.
Short-term Educational Programs
306. How would you feel about taking a marriage preparation course with your significant other? Why would (or wouldn’t) you? What would you expect to learn?
307. Your church, mosque, or synagogue requires you to undergo one to three sessions of premarital counseling if you wish to be married there. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad one? Explain.
308. Do you know of couples in your family who could benefit from a short term course in relationship enhancement? Would they be willing to participate? What might get in their way from attending? Explain,
309. You and your significant other arrive at a therapist’s office for premarital counseling and are each handed a psychological inventory to fill out. What kind of feedback would you expect from the therapist?
310. Some ethnic groups exert considerable influence over the choice of marriage partners of its young people by matching individuals to one another or by forbidding marrying outside of the group. How does your own cultural background influence whom you might marry?
311. Would you and your significant other consider attending a marriage encounter weekend? Why or why not?
CLASS EXERCISE
Learning new patterns for resolving one’s family problems may come from observing another family deal with an analogous problem. In Marriage Encounter weekends, couples have an opportunity to observe other married people attempt to solve their problems. Visit one of these programs and report back to the class on what you identify as the major change agents.
