This book, specifically designed to meet the needs of those teaching and learning interviewing and diagnostic skills in clinical, counseling and school psychology, counselor education, and other programs preparing mental health professionals, offers a rich array of practical, hands-on, class- and workshop-tested role-playing and didactic exercises. The authors present 20 complex profiles of a broad range of clients—adults, teens, and children; differing in ethnicity, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, presenting problems, and problem severity.
Key Features
- Detailed profiles providing a wealth of information about each client's feelings, thoughts, actions, and relationship patterns.
- Exercises accompanying each client profile that can be assigned to students not participating in role-playing.
- Focus on essential interviewing skills such as reflective listening, empathetic comments, and responding to nonverbal behaviour.
- Encouragement to develop diagnostic choices from Axis I to Axis V, considering individual, situational, and biological factors.
- Emphasis on understanding diversity and respecting the client's perceptions.
Additional Information
The authors, who bring to their task a combined 31 years of practice and 24 years of teaching these skills, present exercises that highlight attending, asking open and closed questions, summarising, redirecting, supportively confronting, and commenting on process. The profiles are detailed enough to support a focus on whatever interviewing skills an instructor particularly values. Throughout, the authors emphasise the importance of understanding diversity and respecting the client's perceptions—and of reflecting on the ways in which the interviewer's own identity influences the process.
