Treatment, Planning and Intervention

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(1) Provide a very brief description of the client (one short paragraph).
This vignette provides a description of a family of African American descent that includes parents and two children, Stella 13 and Neal 9. Mrs. Long presents in therapy with depression and with no known physical illness, but recently lost her job. The family does not communicate with one another. Mr. Long unhappy with burdening the financial load has begun drinking, and has developed a habit of staying away from home to avoid the chaos. To make matters worse, the children have begun to quarrel with one another. Mr. Long has blames her for the children's constant quarreling, and she blames his drinking on all the confusion. Mrs. Long has become more and more depresses as she realized she is losing her once loving and close-knit family. The method of assessment chosen for this family is a modified version of the Beck Depression Inventory-second version (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988).), and Solution-focused therapy (SDT, de Shazer & Berg, 1977)

(2) Describes the rationale for using these particular assessment forms (that is, agency policy, diagnostic clarification, and so on).
Studies show that depression is a major health problems that cuts across cultural and racial lines. A depressive illness can be extremely difficult for people, who have limited resources, or belong to a low socioeconomic status group such as experienced by African Americans. In addition, research reveals that individuals with diverse backgrounds are impacted by factors such as: (a) absenteeism from work, (b) diminished productivity, (c) interpersonal relationships, (d) loss of pleasure in activities, and (e) alcohol, or other substance abuse (Reinecke, & Davison, 2002). African Americans are often reluctant to use common health interventions, because of a lack of trust of the counselors; and because they feel that their problems are not always addressed. Hence, models appropriate for counseling with and African American family is based on one that recognized based on a high level of interaction. For these reasons, an integrated therapeutic approach based on the BDI-II (Beck et al., 1990) and Solutions Focused Therapy (SFT, deShazer & Berg, 1977) is considered as a rationale for a treatment approach for this family.

(3) What are the main goals for this client's therapy?

The main goal is for Mrs. Long to not be ashamed of her depression and view treatment in a way that does not undermine her cultural tradition of being an independent person. A secondary goal is to get the family to learn how to communicate with one another, so that they can solve their problem that consists of Mr. Long's substance abuse. The problems and stress being put on the family as a whole by Mrs. Long's depressive bouts and Mr. Long's drinking and absence from the home may be contributing to the children's problems that only serve to exacerbate Mrs. Long's depression.
From this evaluation, an integrated intervention is proposed consisting of the Beck depression Inventory II (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988), and Solution-focused Therapy (SFT, Berg & de Shazer, 1977). SFT is a future-focused, goal oriented approach that emphasizes the importance of working toward solutions to a problem, rather than focusing on the problem. As an example, the depression of African ...