Therapeutic Group

Therapeutic Group

Therapy for Anxiety Support Group   

The focus, in this case, is an anxiety therapy group whereby therapy is valued as an option for individuals to grow out of anxiety (Carpenter et al., 2018). The group will address anxiety as a wide-ranging problem, including social anxiety, ever-present anxiety, panic attacks, and anxiety associated with traumatic events. The recommended treatment intervention is cognitive-behavioral therapy aimed at altering the patient’s thought patterns as well as those behaviors that trigger anxiety (Păsărelu, Andersson, Bergman Nordgren & Dobrean, 2017). The group also seeks to encourage individuals to develop meaningful and close relationships with persons with whom they can share or communicate their emotional lives. As social beings, sitting alone in trauma, pain, and fear is considered a recipe for developing anxiety.

The group’s focus will be providing a safe and healing environment for people to seek services to improve or address anxiety through therapy. Essentially, the services are to be offered by qualified therapists with knowledge of social work, stress management, and mindfulness (Păsărelu et al., 2017). In so doing, the group’s specific emphasis is on assisting individuals in addressing or improving their coping skills and increasing the ability to manage depressive, anxiety, and mood disorder symptoms. Therefore, the group’s specialty centers on anxiety management and how to address depression while simultaneously improving the target population’s coping skills. Specifically, issues to be addressed must be common or aligned with the community’s common mental health issues. This will involve teenage and young adults’ common problems, including autism, anger management, hoarding, bipolar disorder, family conflict, self-esteem, and school issues (Carpenter et al., 2018). Furthermore, the mental health focus or emphasis should be on mood disorders, impulsive control disorders, and personality disorders. It is also understandable that sexuality issues have emerged as causes of stress and anxiety problems. The younger generation is more prone to problems in dealing with sexuality, including gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities. This will be a haven for learning how to cope and replace negative thought patterns with positive ones. The age focus for this group is pre-teens, who are between 10 and 13 years; younger children transitioning into the pre-teen stage, between 6 and 10 years; and adolescents between 14 and 19 years. The last group should be younger adults, between 20 and 24 years, experiencing the highlighted challenges in their transition into adulthood.

The central basis of this group will be the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy approach as a treatment approach in which the role of thinking is used in understanding how people feel and their impeding behaviors (Kodal et al., 2018). Therefore, adolescents and young adults are understood as having their thoughts embedded in negative feelings. In so doing, therapists’ responsibility is centered on identifying and testing the reality and correcting dysfunctional beliefs that define or determine an individual’s thinking (Păsărelu et al., 2017). Stress or anxiety is, therefore, attributed to an individual’s thinking pattern (Kodal et al., 2018). The group’s therapists will work and collaborate with patients to modify their negative thoughts and introduce positive reinforcement or schemas.

Screening Tools

Screening tests are not used in diagnosing emotional, mental, and psychological disorders. Rather, these are useful tools that can form the basis for understanding a condition or a problem (Hinz et al., 2017). The outcomes are then used in deciding whether the test results show that one should seek professional help or figure out how best they can address the issue under consideration. This group will provide such services to the community, mostly free. One of the considerations will be online psychological tests. This approach permits the completion of a screening test on a computer and assesses whether there’s a need to seek professional help or another way of coping with the condition or situation.

For the group to be successful, it must set a criterion for assessing as well as screening prospective individuals to diagnose them with anxiety or other mental health disorders. Only upon screening a client will the group diagnose them for the condition and admit them for counseling (Tanaka et al., 2018). Screening tools will be crucial in the process as they’re used for diagnosis, decision-making, symptom and problem identification, and treatment planning (Hinz et al., 2017). As such, the results obtained from these tools help achieve therapy goals. This is because some screening tools have questions centering on the client’s strengths, including how the overall goal achievement or realization will be achieved, including the examination of the progress and how positive changes can be promoted.

One of the screening tools will be the GAD Test (Generalized Anxiety Disorder), a tool that helps determine if an individual has an anxiety disorder or is exhibiting symptoms (Hinz et al., 2017). The tool provides information as to whether one should consider seeking treatment or diagnosis for the condition from a professional or a doctor. Some of the questions to be asked in this case will include: “whether one continually worries about situations, problems, activities, or events”, “whether one has challenges in controlling emotions or anxieties”, “whether one has trouble concentrating”, “whether one has feelings of restless, irritability, or sleeping problems”, among others. Another testing tool will be the Social Anxiety Test, aimed at identifying social anxiety disorder symptoms so that one can seek a diagnosis or find a way of dealing with the problem (Tanaka et al., 2018). The same questions will be asked, but this time, confined to examining whether one has intense fear around others, making mistakes in front of people, fear of judgment, embarrassment, or whether one tries to avoid social situations perceived or believed to be causing anxiety.

The screening tools will provide the data for assessing the nature of the problem and individual characteristics. Some assessment tools will include checklists, which involve a list of diagnostic criteria for anxiety, depression, or mood disorders (Tanaka et al., 2018). Observation serves as an important assessment tool since a counselor or therapist listens and watches the patients while making notes. Additionally, the process will involve or entail the use of interviews and questionnaires.

Documentation

A progress report is needed for each case to ensure that the milestones are measured or evaluated against the baseline condition and the patient’s progress. For each individual or group, such a document enables the group members to decipher whether the aims and goals of the therapy are being achieved or whether there should be adjustments. The group’s documentation will include weekly or biweekly reports centering on the type and aim of the therapy. Yet, it is understandable that a treatment intervention cannot commence without the approval of the patient or client. In this case, there will be an inherent necessity for providing a consent form to the patient for approval. This is a document needed to ascertain that the patient has agreed to the treatment. It also ensures that the group has adhered to the ethical obligation in treatment that a patient is not forced into treatment without their informed consent. Furthermore, this documentation is relevant because the focus will be on teenagers and the pre-teen population who cannot give informed consent for a specific treatment. In so doing, the documents will require informed consent from their parents. The documentation is also meant to address any legal issues arising from the treatment option, as the law obligates that patients are treated at their discretion.

References

Carpenter, J. K., Andrews, L. A., Witcraft, S. M., Powers, M. B., Smits, J. A., & Hofmann, S. G. (2018). Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and related disorders: A meta‐analysis of randomized placebo‐controlled trials. Depression and anxiety, 35(6), 502-514.

Hinz, A., Klein, A. M., Brähler, E., Glaesmer, H., Luck, T., Riedel-Heller, S. G., … & Hilbert, A. (2017). Psychometric evaluation of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Screener GAD-7, based on a large German general population sample. Journal of affective disorders, 210, 338-344.

Kodal, A., Fjermestad, K., Bjelland, I., Gjestad, R., Öst, L. G., Bjaastad, J. F., … & Wergeland, G. J. (2018). Long-term effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy for youth with anxiety disorders. Journal of anxiety disorders, 53, 58-67.

Păsărelu, C. R., Andersson, G., Bergman Nordgren, L., & Dobrean, A. (2017). Internet-delivered transdiagnostic and tailored cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 46(1), 1-28.

Tanaka, Y., Yoshinaga, N., Tsuchiyagaito, A., Sutoh, C., Matsuzawa, D., Hirano, Y., … & Shimizu, E. (2018). Mental imagery in social anxiety disorder: the development and clinical utility of a Japanese version of the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (SUIS-J). Asia Pacific Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 9(2), 171-185.

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Therapeutic Group

With your selected group type in mind, consider the population and topic of the group you will design.

Write a 1,200- to 1,500-word description of the group including the need and purpose it will serve in your community. Include the following in your description:

1. Group population (age, gender, etc.)
2. Group topic, in addition to the need and purpose the group will serve (support, therapy, etc.)
3. Screening tools used to match the appropriate client to the appropriate group. What type of screening questions or criterion might you use to select your group members?
4. What type(s) of documentation will you need for the group to operate and/or complete its goals? This might include a progress report or note. It may also include a consent for treatment.
5. At least three scholarly resources outside of your course textbook

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the GCU Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. Refer to the LopesWrite Technical Support articles for assistance.

Benchmark Information

This benchmark assignment assesses the following programmatic competency:

BS Behavioral Health Science

2.3: Analyze the different clinical and documentation skills to be an effective member of an interdisciplinary team.