1. Choose a client from your current field internship or place of employment. Be sure to change the name to protect confidentiality.
2. Briefly describe the agency setting and the source and reason for referral.
3. Briefly identify your client’s age, living situation, work situation, and family and cultural background. Do not include information that would make your client easy to identify.
4. Generate a diagnosis. Please remember that the DSM 5 is a reference manual. Using your understanding of the DSM and the organization of the manual including major classifications of disorders and criteria for determining the “presence” of a particular disorder, consider the whole book potentially useful to your work, including categories we have not yet covered.
5. Document your process. For example, which major categories did you consider initially? What key features did your client exhibit that suggested a particular category of disorder? How did you rule in or rule out particular disorders. Do you need additional information to rule in a particular disorder? If so, what information do you need and for what purpose
6. Identify and discuss examples of specific criteria involved in the diagnoses you considered that require an evaluative judgment to be made, based on such things as varied understandings of normative behavior, language that is open to interpretation, and a clinical threshold that is represented in non-specific terms. This is the reliability question as it relates to the DSM.
7. Using literature available on your selected diagnosis and/or symptom focus (peer reviewed e-journals found in the Touro College DATABASES/LIBRARIES are appropriate but not Wikipedia or other internet sites), identify and briefly discuss two treatment approaches found to be effective either in addressing prominent symptoms displayed by your client or a specific disorder you have ruled in based on DSM 5 criteria. You may not reuse a previous assignment—it is important that you use this part of the paper to broaden and/or deepen your understanding of interventions and their rationale for use in particular circumstances. Please note: While psychopharmacological interventions may be indicated, do not select psychopharmacological interventions for the purpose of this paper. Select interventions a social worker might employ. You may use articles from the course bibliography if appropriate to your topic. Be sure to document your sources using APA publication style for your in-text citations and reference list.
Here’s a summery of the case: S.I is a new student (freshman) at Forest Hills high school. S.I migrated from Uzbekistan to the United States as a child, and now she is 14 years old. She comes from a Christian home and has enrolled in Forest Hill as a freshman. Lives with booth parents and siblings. Due to COVID -19 pandemic, the high school was forced to conduct learning remotely. However, some students like S.I had not gotten the hang of virtual learning. She was referred to C.A.S.E (also known as Common Point Queens—an organization within the school that advocates for students and helps students enrolled in the high school program) by the attendance department. S.I was put on my caseload in December (3 months post-school starting). By that point, the student was extremely demotivated and stopped attending school completely. The student wants to attend physical learning because she thinks she does better academically when she is in the actual building. She had been severely bullied but her classmates who were of her own race but muslim. Students arrived at her home to start physical altercations, her fathers car was vandalized by getting egged. Students had created memes of her while she was on zoom in class and posting them online. She eventually started joining classes but asked her teachers to keep the camera off. A report was made about the incident to the school. Therefore she struggles to go outside and see friends. As a result, the family has decided to allow her to spend a year in Uzbekistan and continue her studies there if she likes it when they will fly there in July.
Diagnosis I chose: Adjustment disorder, Social Anxiety
Citations: American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Desk reference to the diagnostic criteria from DSM 5. Washington, DC: APA.
Morrison, J. (2014). DSM-5 Made Easy: The clinician’s guide to diagnosis. New York: Guilford Press.
