Case Assessment and Intervention Planning: Students will complete three case reports. Utilizing your beginning understanding of crisis work, for this assignment you are being asked to perform a case assessment on a clinical scenario assigned by the instructor.
Rate the client in each of the three domains (Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive) using the Severity Scale included with each domain on the Triage Assessment Form (TAF) and total the scores. Describe, in detail, the rationale for your ratings
Summarize diagnostic skills and techniques that can be used to screen for addiction, aggression, and danger to self and others, as you note these risks in your client, such as the Hybrid Model and the ABC’s of Assessing Crisis Intervention found
in Chapter 3 of your text. Similarly, a possible co-occurring mental disorder (such as substance abuse) may become apparent during a crisis, disaster, or other trauma-causing event that ties in with your assessment during the client’s crisis.
Include your judgment about how intense and directive the treatment should be based upon the total TAF score. Drawing on the theoretical and research literature, develop and propose intervention designed to address the crisis. Your assessment will ideally provide the rationale for your proposed intervention, as will crisis theory and clinical research literatures. The proposal should be sensitive to issues of diversity.
Nara, age 40, lost her husband of 20 years approximately 4 years earlier after an acute illness. He had been well up to 2 days prior to death, and they had imminent travel plans until the point his illness turned grave with complications. Nara is still shocked that her husband died so suddenly. She felt like “someone had cut her in two with a saw.”
Nara was a successful professional who had maintained the apartment she and her husband shared as though it were a museum. She has been unable to live there after his death and instead has moved in with her elderly mother and older sister in an apartment. She periodically visits her own apartment for which she continues to pay rent, but cannot tolerate spending the night there.
Nara is aware that she is unable to move on with her life. Even more than missing her husband, her primary issue is a paralyzing sense of guilt. This is the result of her perceived failure to honor her religion’s tenets and practices in terms of a wake, funeral and burial (she was raised as a strict Catholic) after his death. Contrary to her beliefs, he requested that he be cremated and that she do whatever she wanted with his ashes as long as it did not include a ceremony of any sort, including a memorial. She feels that she did not give him the proper send-off.
Nara has stopped going to church and her gym, has lost 20 pounds and has been noted by family members to just sit in her chair for multiple hours at a time without talking or watching television or listening to the radio.
