Thursday, October 22, 2015

Communication and Persuasion in Clinical Social Work


            There are many academic roads to therapy, and even more methods of helping people in life-altering ways.  But I chose to devote my life to social work because of its emphasis on the individual and the greater opportunity to influence others in spiritual as well as cognitive or physical ways.  In my subjective opinion, other fields such as Marriage and Family Therapy or Psychology focus more on the acquisition of knowledge to understand people, with less of an emphasis on actually helping them.

             I volunteer with Wasatch Mental Health, which means I spend a lot of time chatting with patients just before they go into therapy.  My advisor, who I meet with regularly, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with many years of experience in the field.  So although I have never actually seen therapy in action, piecing together these two perspectives has given me a clearer understanding of it.

            From the patients I have learned that the effectiveness in communication is largely dependent on long-term relationships.  They express frustration and sadness when they change therapists because to them it feels like they have to start over again.  The kairos of an effective therapy must be built up deliberately over a long period of time for communication to be most effective.  At the same time, I have been surprised by the number of people who decide to open up about their problems to me, a volunteer in the waiting room who they have never met before.

            From the therapists I have gleaned some insight into the stress weighing on their shoulders.  Burnout is a real issue in social work, and sometimes the therapists need people to help them bear their burdens just as much as the patients do.  On the positive end, experienced therapists have had so much communication with people who have specific psychological difficulties that some of them can be 90% sure of a diagnosis within just a few minutes of talking to them.


            Therapy is the ultimate form of individualized verbal communication, including judicial journeys into the past to resolve deep-seated pain, epideictic evaluations of what is to blame for their difficulties in the present, and deliberative discussions about the best course of action for the future.  Each patient is their own context to which the therapist adapts within the perspective of their own discipline.  Both are at times speaker and audience, mentor and trainee, guide and follower, united in the common effort of bringing peace, functionality, and happiness to the inner confines of a single human soul.

3 comments:

  1. It's interesting how the emotional and mental well being of not only a patient but also a therapist is so crucially dependent on communication. It seems so important that both sides learn how to communicate their thoughts effectively so this burnout doesn't happen and action can actually be taken to help the patient, and not just listen to what they are saying, but actually use communication to come up with solutions to the problem.

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  2. I have also considered going into this field, so thanks for the post. I love how you said the kairos most be built up for communication to be most effective. I guess I always looked at the kairos as the present moment, not something that could be manipulated over time.

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  3. I also really liked how you pointed out that therapy needs to be kairotic. People experience different emotions and perceive things differently based on their experiences--even over one day or week. And although therapy can play a vital role in healing, I like how you said that social work actively helps--it, too, plays off of the kairos of a situation in order to most effectively make a difference in an individual's life.

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