Personal reflection and discussion with colleagues is essential to your development as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. In Week 8, you collaborated with colleagues as you participated in your first Clinical Supervision. This week, you have the opportunity to continue your collaboration as you reflect on and discuss your experiences with counseling older adults. Keep in mind that although there may be challenges to counseling this population, these clients offer unique learning opportunities. For this Clinical Supervision, consider an older client you are counseling whom you do not think is adequately progressing according to expected clinical outcomes. Students will:
Assess clients presenting for psychotherapy
Evaluate effectiveness of therapeutic approaches for clients
receiving psychotherapy Review this week’s media and consider the insights provided.
Reflect on the clients you are currently counseling at your practicum site.Describe an older client you are counseling whom you do not think is adequately progressing according to expected clinical outcomes.
Explain your therapeutic approach with the client, including the perceived effectiveness of your approach.
Identify any additional information about this client that may potentially impact expected out Clinical Supervision Essay Paper
Clinical Supervision
Description of the Client
The client Mrs. A, a 71-year-old man, has been attending counseling. The client reported that she feels lost, helpless and depressed ever since she lost her husband three months ago, just five months after losing her only child. Mrs. A stays alone and her relatives live far away. However, she gets to meet with her friends often, especially during religious gatherings. Five weeks ago, the client was diagnosed with breast cancer stage 1, and this diagnosis was extremely appalling to her.
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After two weeks of attending counseling sessions, the client has not been able to accept the diagnosis and also has not yet recovered from the trauma of losing her husband and her child as well. during counseling, the client is always preoccupied with impending death and as a result she has refused to start treatment in spite of being counseled and educated that at stage 1, cancer can be arrested and cured. In addition, the client sorrowful mood has not improved in spite of the counseling.
Therapeutic Approach with the Client
The therapeutic approach that was used for the client is person-centered therapy. During all counseling sessions, a holistic approach tailored according to the client’s individual needs was used. Throughout the counseling, all attempts were made to ensure that the therapeutic environment enabled the client to review and interact more with her feelings, emotions, thoughts, and meanings as well (Heidari et al, 2016). Therapeutic conditions provided for the client included empathy, understanding, positive regard, and genuineness. Clinical Supervision Essay Paper
Person-centered therapy presumes that humans have the ability to work out their own solutions after recognizing their ability to do so; regardless of how helpless a person feels, there is inherent instinct to survive, which enables a person to forge ahead. As a result, through person-centered therapy, a person is able to understand their emotions and develop stronger personality; this assists people to start viewing life as meaningful through self-actualization (Mohdsa et al, 2014).
Additional Information on the Client
Building trust and establishing an effective therapeutic relationship with this client was a big challenge. The client would keep on inquiring regarding my counseling experience and my educational qualifications; it was evident that she would have more trust in a counselor who seemed more experienced, probably judging by the age. According to Koops et al (2016) the older adults tend to regard highly health practitioners they perceive to be competent and highly experienced. Therefore, the lack of trust may affect the clinical outcome for this client.
In addition, during counseling sessions, I would often adjust my communication style, which would make the client uncomfortable. For example, there were times I would try to adapt my communication styles to fit my beliefs and theoretical knowledge about the suitable communication styles for the older adults (Kornhaber et al, 2016), rather than trying to fit my communication styles to the characteristics of this specific client. However, once I noticed that the client was not comfortable with adjusting the communication style, I tried to rectify this.
References
Heidari F, Amiri A & Amir Z. (2016). The Effect of Person-Centered Narrative Therapy on Happiness and Death Anxiety of Elderly People. Asian Social Science, 12(10).
Kornhaber R, Walsh K, Duff J & Walker K. (2016). Enhancing adult therapeutic interpersonal relationships in the acute health care setting: an integrative review. J Multidiscip Healthc, 2016(9) 537–546.
Koops R, Winter A, Sijmen R, Hoeks J & Jansen M. (2016). Development of a Communication Intervention for Older Adults with Limited Health Literacy: Photo Stories to Support Doctor-Patient Communication. Journal of Health Communication. 21(1).
Mohdsa F, Yusoff F & Subhi S. (2014). The Effectiveness of Person-centered Therapy and Cognitive Psychology Ad-din Group Counseling on Self-concept, Depression, and Resilience of Pregnant Out-of-wedlock Teenagers. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences. 114(21), pp: 927-932. Clinical Supervision Essay Paper