Group Psychotherapy

Resocontiamo la costruzione di un setting con i familiari entro un’organizzazione sociosanitaria per adulti con diagnosi di disabilità intellettiva. In coerenza con un modello semiotico dell'inconscio (Fornari 1976; Matte Blanco 1975) fondato sul costrutto di collusione (Carli & Paniccia 2003) istituiamo piccoli gruppi con genitori e familiari di famiglie differenti. L'intervento mostra come le culture collusive delle famiglie ascrivano ruoli stereotipati reciproci (Sharff, 1989/1999). Ruoli che delineano i figli come privi di risorse e prescrivono ai genitori un ruolo di assistenza e controllo. Ruolo agito con gli psicoterapisti cui si chiede di eliminare la conflittualità dei figli reattiva al controllo genitoriale e di essere sostituiti nell’obbligo ad assistere. Il setting permette di riconoscere come tali culture collusive creino relazioni insoddisfacenti entro le famiglie, tra famiglie e con l'organizzazione, e di recuperare i desideri di sviluppo reciproci.

Os grupos de dinâmicas são ofertados pela Clínica Psicológica da Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL). São abertos ao público em geral e organizados por faixas etárias. O grupo infantil é direcionado a crianças de quatro a 11 anos de idade e caracteriza-se por brincadeiras e atividades que propõem reflexões a respeito dos temas pertinentes a idade. Objetiva-se relatar a experiência do grupo de dinâmicas infantil demonstrando a importância e o efeito terapêutico do brincar no acolhimento infantil. Observa-se que este serviço pôde contribuir para problematizar os espaços de acolhimento psicológico a crianças e se apresentou como alternativa para a demanda na lista de espera para psicoterapia individual.

This conceptual essay places the Buddhist notion of sunyata, or emptiness, at the heart of the enterprise of teaching mindfulness with military Veterans. It is a term that brings before us the necessity of having an open and “unknowing” mind, one that frees both students or clients and instructor from becoming mired in routinized, auto-pilot modes of psychotherapy delivery.  While attention to the teaching of mindfulness has centered on the training of instructors and  their employment of manualized treatment modalities, this essay shifts the emphasis to what humanistic psychologists and educationalists have termed variously “fusion-knowledge” (Maslow) and the “live classroom” (G. I. Brown). Humanistic psychological insights are brought in dialogue with the fields of knowledge management and organizational learning and, most importantly, transformative learning theory. The author’s group-based delivery of mindfulness in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) setting provides an example of a curriculum that is collaboratively generated and based in the ongoing creation of a common vocabulary for living and thinking mindfully. An expansive, improvisational approach to teaching mindfulness is posited as beneficial for the creation of new forms of awareness that shape our psychological and intellectual relations to the lived world.

Cet ouvrage est basé sur une recherche conduite auprès d’enseignants qui ont mis en œuvre des pratiques de pédagogie institutionnelle inscrites dans la suite des travaux fondateurs d’Aïda Vasquez et de Fernand Oury. Il y est notamment question de processus subjectifs pouvant apparaître au sein des groupes de pairs auxquels participent les enseignants, mais aussi des modalités selon lesquelles ces groupes ont pu se constituer
au fil de l’histoire.
Affirmée comme l’un des trois piliers fondateurs de la pédagogie institutionnelle, la dimension groupale est pourtant peu traitée dans les écrits de ce courant et bien souvent de manière imprécise. Ce livre propose une contribution sur la question du groupe dans le champ des « pratiques de l’institutionnel » en insistant sur les liens entre le versant pédagogique et le versant psychothérapeutique de ces approches.
Le public plus particulièrement concerné est celui des praticiens de pédagogies coopératives, des étudiants ou chercheurs qui s’intéressent à la situation groupale en éducation ou en formation et, plus généralement, des personnes engagées dans des dispositifs d’élaboration de la pratique professionnelle enseignante, éducative ou soignante.

Psychodrama has been shown to bring about positive change by reducing inhibition and
promoting spontaneity. Most studies have focused on the psychotherapeutic effects of the enactment techniques. However, the nature of clients’ psychosocial schemas arising in enactments, in multi-session psychodrama groups, has not been explored. In this study, the schemas that arose in enactments in a three-day experiential psychodrama group were examined. An across case and within case approach was used with the video recorded group sessions. The data was analysed using qualitative descriptive methods and Young’s early maladaptive schema framework. The dominant themes were that of disconnection and rejection, and emotional inhibition. These findings lend support for psychodrama as a group psychotherapy treatment that can reduce inhibition and promote spontaneity.

The study aim was to test whether a 12-week publically rebated group programme, based upon Steketee and Frost's Cognitive Behavioural Therapy-based hoarding treatment, would be efficacious in a community-based setting. Over a 3-year period, 77 participants with clinically significant hoarding were recruited into 12 group programmes. All completed treatment; however, as this was a community-based naturalistic study, only 41 completed the post-treatment assessment. Treatment included psychoeducation about hoarding, skills training for organization and decision making, direct in-session exposure to sorting and discarding, and cognitive and behavioural techniques to support out-of-session sorting and discarding, and nonacquiring. Self-report measures used to assess treatment effect were the Savings Inventory-Revised (SI-R), Savings Cognition Inventory, and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales. Pre-post analyses indicated that after 12 weeks of treatment, hoarding symptoms as measured on the SI-R had reduced significantly, with large effect sizes reported in total and across all subscales. Moderate effect sizes were also reported for hoarding-related beliefs (emotional attachment and responsibility) and depressive symptoms. Of the 41 participants who completed post-treatment questionnaires, 14 (34%) were conservatively calculated to have clinically significant change, which is considerable given the brevity of the programme judged against the typical length of the disorder. The main limitation of the study was the moderate assessment completion rate, given its naturalistic setting. This study demonstrated that a 12-week group treatment for hoarding disorders was effective in reducing hoarding and depressive symptoms in an Australian clinical cohort and provides evidence for use of this treatment approach in a community setting. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A 12-week group programme delivered in a community setting was effective for helping with hoarding symptoms with a large effect size. Hoarding beliefs (emotional attachment and responsibility) and depression were reduced, with moderate effect sizes. A third of all participants who completed post-treatment questionnaires experienced clinically significant change. Suggests that hoarding CBT treatment can be effectively translated into real-world settings and into a brief 12-session format, albeit the study had a moderate assessment completion rate.

Cet ouvrage est basé sur une recherche conduite auprès d’enseignants qui ont mis en œuvre des pratiques de pédagogie institutionnelle inscrites dans la suite des travaux fondateurs d’Aïda Vasquez et de Fernand Oury. Il y est notamment question de processus subjectifs pouvant apparaître au sein des groupes de pairs auxquels participent les enseignants, mais aussi des modalités selon lesquelles ces groupes ont pu se constituer
au fil de l’histoire.
Affirmée comme l’un des trois piliers fondateurs de la pédagogie institutionnelle, la dimension groupale est pourtant peu traitée dans les écrits de ce courant et bien souvent de manière imprécise. Ce livre propose une contribution sur la question du groupe dans le champ des « pratiques de l’institutionnel » en insistant sur les liens entre le versant pédagogique et le versant psychothérapeutique de ces approches.
Le public plus particulièrement concerné est celui des praticiens de pédagogies coopératives, des étudiants ou chercheurs qui s’intéressent à la situation groupale en éducation ou en formation et, plus généralement, des personnes engagées dans des dispositifs d’élaboration de la pratique professionnelle enseignante, éducative ou soignante.

Through the use of Relational Group Process (Erskine, 2013) the therapist(s) and group members join together to build an intersubjective environment a co-constructed group experience. This process encourages people to respectfully listen and inquire of each other, to move out of the role of simply being observers of group dynamics, and to stop engaging in judgmental assessments of the others. The intersubjective aspects of Integrative Psychotherapy are essential components for achieving the goal of integration. The set of relational methods outlined in Integrative Psychotherapy provide a comprehensive guide for intersubjective treatment. When these methods are applied to the group setting in the format of relational group process, they allow the integration of different experiences in the group matrix. The more the group matrix holds individual experiences, the more internal and external contact of group members is fostered. A case study illustrating these concepts and dynamics is presented.

Chronic alcoholics often have great difficulty in adjusting their lifestyle to accommodate the goals agreed upon in treatment. A 16-week behavioral self-management program, which emphasized creating lifestyle changes in the community, was offered to 193 clients. To assist in the process of treatment delivery, half of the clients were offered the support of trained community volunteers during the treatment program. To give volunteers a time period in which to to meet and start working with their clients, only those clients who completed at least the first 4 weeks of the 16-week program (N = 106) were included in the evaluation. Independent follow-up was conducted over a 12-month period. A significant reduction in alcohol consumption was found for clients of both the volunteer-support (VS; N = 52) and the office-based (OB; N = 54) groups; this reduction was maintained over the 12 months of review, with no major differences found between groups. Volunteers rated high on particular characteristics assisted the client more effectively during treatment than those rated low. The variability in hours spent between volunteer-client pairs appeared to mask any main effects, and also the length of the contact period with the volunteer was too short. It is recommended that the use of volunteers be evaluated further by extending the client contact time into the follow-up period.

This brief report presents the rationale for the importance of integrating trauma therapy with cognitive remediation in order to enhance both component interventions in the treatment of serious mental illness. It describes a general format that allows the above integration and suggests that future studies should investigate the efficacy of the proposed group design.

In the same way that a pilot checks all of the functions and operations of an airplane, it can be very useful to perform a similar systems check on yourself every now and then. Assessing where you are and what tools, skills and supports you have in place at any given period can lower risk factors and prepare you for anything that may unexpectedly come your way, (Again similar to the pilot who does a systems check for safety before taking off in flight)

Recent research has suggested that school-based programmes of prevention of eating disorders obtained ambiguous results. The aim of our work was to establish the efficacy of the eating disorders prevention programme for schoolgirls of secondary schools. Subjects in the experimental groups received 8 sessions of practice with various tasks, while the control group did not participate in sessions of psychoeducation. Overall, we examined 109 adolescents participating in sessions and 117 adolescents in the control group. Participants were examined at the beginning of the programme, after the operation and 6 months later. Assessment was made with EDI, EAT-26. Assessment before and after the study phase showed that participants in the experimental groups had not made significantly more improvement than the control group. It was also shown that in the two subgroups (girls form technical college and girls form college) there were significant differences in the pre-test, post-test and follow...

This paper presents various models of child and adolescent prevention programmes of eating disorders with the emphasis on the efficiency of these models. On the ground of the available literature, the authors present the results of these methods. It seems that in every prevention programme risk and protective factors, which are connected with the given intervention should be precisely defined. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that the programmes should be clear with better inner coherence which will consequently result in better efficiency.

This case study of combined anxiety with both alcohol and benzodiazepine dependence illustrates key issues in presentation, differential diagnosis and management. The case is discussed from a biopsychosocial perspective with each of the discussants focusing on their particular area of experience and expertise, then the treatment package is presented in an integrated fashion. Of particular interest is how social anxiety disorder may become a significant barrier to engagement and retention, and thus outcome in persons presenting for addiction treatment, and how a treatment plan for such patients can be built.