Briefly review the essential psychosocial data of the case.
Describe significant experiences in your client’s life-long physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development, and discuss how those experiences have contributed to the ways that your client functions today. Your discussion should include the ways that your client’s current strengths and vulnerabilities are linked to earlier attachment experiences and are influenced by the client’s cultural identification. Again, note any developmental experiences that have contributed to areas of adaptive functioning as well as areas of maladaptive functioning. In sum:
Provide an overview of their current functioning, including challenges and strengths.
Link their current functioning to past relations and experiences.
Use theory to support your ideas about why they are the way they are according to their relationships and experiences.
Outline your ideas for optimal treatment of this client, foreseeing that you would be their clinical social worker. Describe how your “developmental assessment” of your client’s strengths and vulnerabilities (in the previous section) leads directly to specific interventions which will utilize those strengths and address those vulnerabilities. In other words, demonstrate how your treatment plan takes into account your developmental assessment that you described in the section above. Your treatment plan should indicate a specific theoretical approach to interventions. While you can use technique-based models as auxiliary interventions, you should use theoretical interventions from this class.
Describe and discuss any transference reactions your client has had or may have towards you, and any countertransference reactions you have had or may have towards your client (remember that these reactions can be positive and/or negative). Include in your discussion how you think the client’s experiences with oppression or discrimination influenced the transference and countertransference dynamics. Conclude your discussion by describing how you managed or will manage your own and the client’s reactions.
Describe how you evaluated or would evaluate the effects of any of your interventions with your client throughout your work with them. Also include in your discussion how you think your interventions may have alleviated or will alleviate the effects of oppression or discrimination on your client.
Goldstein, E. G., Miehls D., & Ringel, S. (2009). Advanced clinical social work practice:
Relational principles and techniques. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
