Blog 6

First of all, I just want to give a shoutout to Dollarhide and Saginak for using more diverse names in their vignettes (Dovey?)!

Aside from that, I found this chapter salient to my current client that I am working with in Brief Counseling. Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) emphasize that it is important for counselors to know the ins and outs of their clients lives when they begin to counsel them, because things like an IEP or medication history can be very telling of the students behavior (p. 124). I know in my situation, my client wants to work on his trouble getting to sleep at night, however he mentioned in a session that he takes medicine every morning to help him focus. I am guessing that he takes Ritalin for ADD, which could partially explain why he is still stimulated at 8:00 at night. Without knowing this information, I will not be able to properly counsel him because the cause may be directly related to his medication.

                The relevance of this chapter continued in the discussion on crisis prevention and suicide (Dollarhide & Saginak, 2012, p. 125). As most of you know, I helped coordinate the youth mental health rights portion of the conference last week by hosting Aevidum, a student-led group that attempts to de-stigmatize talking about depression and suicide so that students suffering in the dark may be able to find some light. In theory, this is an ideal way to look at the topics, but I wonder how many Joe Vulopases there are out in the world who are actively becoming aware of warning signs of depression and suicide. Hopefully being a counselor who is as involved in the classroom as possible would help with detecting students who are near-crisis, but it also depends on the teachers to make referrals about students who may seem like they are struggling. I know that in my teacher shadowing experience, when a student was complaining about feeling ill the teacher brushed it off as hunger. That could have been good instinct and experience on the teacher’s part, but what about when a seemingly angst-y high school student casually mentions that they feel depressed in math class? Is that something a teacher will brush off?

                My final note on this chapter has to do with the multicultural aspect. Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) spend a page or so discussing multicultural counseling, but then in the follow-up vignette on Dovey and Phillipe, Dovey reaches Mom with no problem and is able to instantly detect the problem going on at home that is contributing to his fighting behavior (p. 135). This would be an ideal situation for a counselor, however I feel that it is not very realistic (especially given what we learned in Multicultural Counseling about other cultures keeping quiet on family issues to mental health workers). I appreciate the examples, but I think it is critical to remember that our jobs will not work out that smoothly with every family.

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K.A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs (2nd Ed.). New York:   Pearson, Inc.