The Therapist's Notebook for Family Health Care

Book excerpt: Effective interventions to help your clients deal with illness, disability, grief, and loss TheTherapist’s Notebook for Family Health Care presents creative interventions for working with individuals, couples, and families dealing with illness, loss, and disability. This book offers creative resources like homework, handouts, and activities, and effective, field-tested interventions to provide counselors with useful information on specific family dynamics and topics. It equips mental health clinicians with practical therapeutic activities to use in their work with clients struggling with health care or grief issues. The effects of illness, disability, and loss in everyday life can be profound. Besides the individual repercussions, these challenges also affect the lives of the family and social networks of those individuals experiencing them. The Therapist’s Notebook for Family Health Care brings together the knowledge and experience of over 30 experts in the field for a unique collection that therapists and clients alike will find immediately useful. Situated in four unique subject-specific sections for quick reference, this text covers a broad scope of common problems. Also included is a bonus section focusing on thoughtful suggestions for self-care and professional development. Some of the many topics and techniques presented in The Therapist’s Notebook for Family Health Care include: conducting interviews using the biopsychosocial-spiritual method using the Family System Test (FAST) to explore clients’ experiences with their healthcare system and providers increasing social support to manage chronic illness coping and adapting to developmental changes, challenges, and opportunities using a patient education tool in family therapy helping children (and their families) to manage pain through knowledge and diaphragmatic breathing creating a personal “superhero” for a child as a means to empowerment and relief of anxiety facilitating family problems using scatterplots building functional perspective of self and others in clients with Asperger Syndrome quilting as a meaning-making intervention for HIV/AIDS empowering terminally-ill patients to say goodbye to their young children in meaningful ways and many more! With a wealth of tables, charts, handouts, and bibliotherapy resources for clients; readings and resources for clinicians; and case vignettes, The Therapist’s Notebook for Family Health Care is an excellent resource for a wide variety of practitioners, including, counselors, psychologists, social workers, grief workers, hospice workers, health psychologists, and medical social workers. It is also an ideal text for psychotherapy and counseling students and educators.