Imagine you get a call for therapy services and the person on the phone tells you that he is the conservator for his 23 year-old daughter and would like her to get treatment with you? How does this affect your clinical practice with the daughter?
What happens if a client dies? Social workers and MFTs frequently ask me legal and ethical questions related to their private practice or licensing prep. One question that I get asked about a lot is the limits to confidentiality, and when we can, or cannot release information. It’s really tricky because there are a lot of different factors that go into this. As practitioners we have a responsibility to our clients and legal responsibilities as well. Let’s take a closer look at this with a sample question:
What's new in the field of mental health? The DSM 5! And while we all transition from the DSM IV to the DSM 5, it is good to take a look at what has changed. If you are preparing for the Social Work Exams or MFT Exams, the ASWB, the BBS, and the AAMTRB have all announced that the DSM 5 will not be tested until 2015.
Have you received absolutely no training as far as planning your social work career is concerned? If this is the case then you are not alone. I had the idea of creating this blog post after speaking to an MSW who was about to graduate from her program at USC, here in Los Angeles where I live, and while I was talking to her it became clear that while she had gotten good clinical training in her graduate program, she had no training in how to plan for her own career. One of the things we aim to do at my company, the Therapist Development Center, besides helping people pass their social work exams, is to actually provide support to therapists throughout their careers. By support I mean giving essential information that is very practical – practical advice. So in this post I want to go through some of the key things that I wish I had known and have learned since I have been out in the field for the past almost 10 years now. The following five points are things I think every social worker should know when they graduate from their MSW program.
No one wants to think about malpractice...I know I don't! But we have to -- it's a risk that we take when we choose to enter a profession whose focus is helping others. One of the most important ways you can protect yourself against malpractice is through the process of informed consent. Of equal importance, this process also (hopefully) protects the client from inadvertently or unknowingly entering into a situation that could lead to uncomfortable emotions, pain, regression, etc.
There has been a frenzy of anxiety about when the DSM V will added to the California LCSW and MFT exams.
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, my colleague Emily Pellegrino did an excellent blog post on defense mechanisms (if you haven't seen it yet, and are studying for the MFT exam, check it out!). We're going to be looking at them again tonight as our attention turns to psychological phenomena. It may seem redundant, but defense mechanisms come up repeatedly on exams, and you, the test-taker, need to understand not only what purpose they serve, but also how to identify major defense mechanisms when they are described in a stem.
