Using Diagrams in Psychotherapy

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Chapter 8 of this book specifically highlights strategies worth considering for clinicians working with “challenging mental health clients” across life spans (e.g., children and adolescents with behavior problems, developmentally disabled clients with persistent behavior problems, clients with persistent psychosis, clients with dual diagnosis of substance abuse and mental illness, and elderly psychiatric clients). This book is consistent with their previously published collaborative publications that advocate for the use of visually enhanced techniques as adjunct to auditory based dialogue in psychotherapy and counseling to enhance more effective communication between clients and clinicians, as auditory based conversation used in the traditional counseling and psychotherapy dialogue technique may be compromised for many psychiatric patients. They also make a strong case for understanding of the role of associative learning process in emotional conditioning that often triggers behavior symptoms and are often the target for psychiatric interventions. The authors suggest that targeted clinical behavior symptoms, specifically of persistent duration with underlying habit formation may often best respond to use of positive redirection strategies that draw from classical conditioning and social learning principles rather than from over reliance on the exclusive use of strategies to increase awareness of consequence to effect changes in mood and behavior a la operant conditioning principle.

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