Written Assignment
Case Study
For your final paper you will write a 5-6 page paper on the following case scenario. In this case, you will be the counselor who sees a middle-aged female for treatment. The client is in a state of crisis.
As you write your paper follow these instructions:
1. What social and environmental stressors have affected the client? Explain their effects on the client.
2. Using the theoretical orientation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, how would you approach and help the client?
3. Using a Psychodynamic theoretical orientation, how would you approach and help the client?
4. Using an Eclectic (from diverse range of sources) approach in your theoretical orientation, how would you approach and help the client?
5. Explain how diversity might potentially affect how you view and treat this client.
6. Provide at least eight scholarly citations, not including assigned course readings, to support your perspectives.
Case Scenario:
Linda is a 42 year old Hispanic female, originally from NYC where she grew up. She lives in a Southern State because she married a man she met at a university she attended in the area. She works in middle management of the Human Resources department of her company. Her company has given her a 6 month leave of absence to focus on taking care of her personal life issues.
Her presenting problem is that she hardly wants to leave her home and suffers very high levels of anxiety when she does so. Every day she finds herself crying and sad. She says that she is not motivated to do anything. Taking a shower and fixing herself up takes major effort. She experiences agitation while trying to sleep. She wakes up exhausted and hopeless.
Her medication does little to help her. Recent events are that she found out that her husband was visiting strip joints, paying prostitutes, and meeting women through a dating phone application. She kicked him out of the house. She does not know what she is going to do. She has been married 21 years and has a son and daughter in college who live at home. Her father recently died.
She has been the one helping her live-in mother with her legal problems while her sister does nothing nor offers any help. She feels unappreciated and abused. Some years ago, she was in Manhattan, NY visiting family when 9/11 happened. She was several miles from Ground Zero. She experiences agitation while trying to sleep. She wakes up exhausted.
Her church friends convinced her to come to see you for psychotherapy. In her first visit, she feels compelled to tell you some early childhood history. At age 8 her grandfather had given her a puppy. That puppy was her world. One day someone left the front door open. The puppy got out and was killed by a truck. She was devastated and did not go to school for a week. At age 16 she was convinced that she was going to marry her dream boyfriend.
At the wedding of an older cousin and during the party celebration, she went to the ladies room with her girl cousin. On the way back she ended up in the wrong section of the hotel at another wedding celebration. Before turning around, she noticed that her boyfriend was attending that party and was intensively kissing another girl she knew hiding behind the stage curtains. With tears in her eyes, she pleads with you saying, "What's wrong with me?