Response to colleague

WK 1 Main Post- Bailey Zaruba

COLLAPSE

Psychotherapy is an intervention that spotlights deficits at the personal level. It is not an intervention that focuses on prevention or strengths. It is a completely individualized treatment that targetsbiologics. Patients undergoing psychotherapy gain a sense of self through new cognitive, emotional, and internal processes creating a long-lasting physical change in the brain (Mitchell & Raque, 2022).

Cultural competence is the ability to understand, participate, and treat diverse patients whose backgrounds and beliefs differ from ours. It is also crucial to consider how these external factors influence patients, their problems, and their interactions. Cultural competence is based on credibility and trust; a therapeutic alliance between the patient and provider relies on this. The provider must be empathetic to fully understand the patient’s point of view; then, we must allow the patient to reflect on their thoughts independently. When we remain open to the client and they can reflect independently, they become more receptive to the providers’ interventions, cognitive challenges, and experiments with the newly implemented behavior. This behavior leads to experiences of change. Having a patient’s trust may be beneficial in navigating tensions in psychotherapy. These tensions include cultural, economic, social, and political tensions (Gaztambide, 2019).  

Integrating social values with psychotherapy is essential. However, much is not known about social justice regarding psychotherapy, as research has not been completed because of the overlapping professional code of ethics. Researchers believe this is sufficient to guide their research on ethical standards and psychotherapy. They have now focused their studies on culturally adaptive research and psychotherapy and aim to better the lives and care of those who have been devalued for years (Paquin et al., 2019).

Clinicians face various ethical dilemmas as they start their therapy endeavors and are of growing concern with difficulties in the decision-making process. These dilemmas often are not straightforward, leading to increasing overwhelm in clinicians. This leads to dilemmas in individual, marital, and family therapies. However, they have differences on practical and conceptual levels. Family therapy involves allowing family members to hear each other out and allow the other to view what the other person’s perspective is like. The therapist’s job is to allow family members to express themselves freely while they alter the distribution of time spent talking and disrupting. This is to further increase communication, especially regarding complex topics, and gather what each member knows about the other.

Furthermore, the therapist’s goal is to help the family to understand each other further while shifting intentions to collaborative efforts. Individual therapy involves internal conflicts within the person rather than multiple people. Some therapists start with individual therapy and build to family therapy, while some simply start family therapy with the entirety of the family (Miller & Springer, 2020).

Therapists must ethically consider the following topics: responsibility, confidentiality, patient privilege, informed consent, the right to refuse treatment, and their values. Essential topics to touch on are responsibility and confidentiality. Their primary responsibility is to respect the rights and well-being of patients. The therapist must consider that one person’s best interests may not be beneficial to the other person due to conflicting patient goals and interests. Otherwise, they also may have differences or disagreements on how to obtain the goals of marital or family therapy. For example, the therapist must not allow one person a benefit at the other family member’s expense. Therapists also have the responsibility of creating a safeguard for patients. They have the right to disclosure and must inform their patients about the limits of confidentiality. For example, in marital therapy, a wife discloses that her husband was having an affair and would like to try to resolve their marriage by stipulating that her husband remain faithful to her. After a few months of therapy, the husband discloses that he has not been faithful and resumed previous activities with another woman. However, he only disclosed this in an individual session, not a conjoined one. However, the therapist conveyed the policy on confidentiality to the couple, allowing her to disclose the information regarding the husband’s faithfulness. This decision was made because it benefits both spouses, and they can conclude that their relationship is over (Miller & Springer, 2020).

References

Gaztambide, D. J. (2019, November). Reconsidering culture, attachment, and inequality in the treatment of a Puerto Rican migrant: Toward structural competence in psychotherapy.Journal of Clinical Psychology, 75,2022-2033.https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22861

Miller, B. J., & Springer, P. (2020, December). Ethics-Based training for clinicians: Moving beyond ethicaldecision making models.Contemporary Family Therapy: An International Journal, 42(4), 370-380.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-020-09537-7

Mitchell, A. M., & Raque, T. L. (2022, June). Addressing health in psychotherapy: Future directions from a community wellness lens.Psychotherapy, 59(2), 296-301.https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000444

Paquin, J. D., Tao, K. W., & Budge, S. L. (2019, December). Toward a psychotherapy science for all: Conducting ethical and socially just research.Psychotherapy, 56(4), 491-502.https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000271