Needs Assessment
Currently, cases of manic disorder are on the American agenda due to the increased ratio of population suffering from this psychological and mental disease. Particular attention, however, should be paid to female population suffering from medication-triggered manic disorders.
In the majority of cases, lonely mothers and housewives belong to the most vulnerable target group suffering from depressions because they often receive less support and recognition from social and psychological perspective. These women fall under the age category from 28 to 45 years because this category has a wider experience in caring for children, as well as difficulties that women face in relations with their husbands.
Lonely mothers, however, are more absorbed with looking after children, taking part-time jobs, and planning budget to sustain normal living for children.
Though housewives do not have money problems, they are socially separated from the social activities and, similar to single mothers, they suffer from moral frustration and depression. Both different groups can potentially resort to medications to raise their mood and avoid manic disorder.
The client group preparation should also be congruent with the group workers’ expectations. In particular, a strict model should be worked out to meet the clients’ needs. Working group should pay attention to several perspectives.
First, group workers should realize the fact that group working should be based solely on medical treatment of symptoms of mental disorder due tot the presence of psychological, social, and emotional contexts, as well as group identification (Brandler & Roman, 1999).
Needs of housewives and lonely mothers differ much from other social groups Therefore, the working group should fit in the new contextual dimensions and consider historical, economic, and cultural backgrounds of patients in the group to define solutions and treatment techniques.
Shifting from a conventional model of treatment where individual approaches prevail, the new client group orientation can widen the hospital’s opportunities and encourage various social groups to address for treatment (Brandler & Roman, 1999).
In this respect, lonely mothers and housewives can receive much greater support in dealing their responsibilities in front of their children, as well as for the family welfare.
Identification of Purpose
The main purpose of the proposed client group is to meet the psychological and emotional needs of lonely mothers and housewives who suffer from medication triggered manic depression. The group purposes meet the objectives of the working group because its main task is to introduce therapeutic approaches to treating mental disorders.
However, the newly created client group objective deviate slightly from the purposes established in agency. First of all, our workers have little experience in facing group treatment of people with identical social backgrounds (Brandler & Roman, 1999).
Rather, they feel more comfortable when it comes to an individual treatment. Second, they have little experience in shared decision making to introduce connections between social backgrounds and emotional concerns.
The suggested group should provide the clients with proper counseling so as to persuade them that their problems can be solved in other ways than taking drugs. The counseling will be based on biological, psychological, and emotional therapeutic approaches.
Before the working group starts working, it should provide agency with appropriate training course for the professionals to fulfill the gap in knowledge of socially predetermined factors influencing specific client groups introduced in the project.
Consideration Regarding Composition
The number of members involved into the client group should depend on several factors. The hospital should ensure that the accepted size is properly handled with medical staff (Brandler & Roman, 1999). Hence, it is strongly suggested that each professional of the client group has no more than ten females under his/her control. Therefore, the proposed size of the client group should not exceed 40 persons.
As per the commonalities, the presence of socially different groups – single mothers and housewives. On the one hand, these two groups are divergent in their perception of the surrounding environment particularly in financial terms. Hence, single mothers often face financial difficulties because of lack of support from the government and from another parent.
In contrast, housewives seem to neglect financial problems because their funding is insured by other parent and governmental support. One the other hand, both groups face similar challenges in terms of children upbringing lack of support from their husband. This is of particular to concern to emotional and psychological participation in looking after children. As a result, both group experience loneliness.
Besides, both types of clients can share experience in terms of time scheduling and financial resources allocation. What is more important is that loneliness is the core reasons for development of depression that can be complicated and change to a manic disorder. Such serious situations can be eliminated if the proposed mixed group attends meetings and counseling sessions in groups.
They can also feel that there are a great number of other women suffering from similar problems. The age characteristics also play a pivotal role in organizing groups. In this respect, the age rang will be within 20 years meaning that the female participants will fall under the age group of 28-45 years.
They should have more than one child to look after so as to approach the problem of proper upbringing in complete and incomplete families having many children.
Race, gender, and ethnic background can also influence social status of females in societies, as well as their traditional on functional roles of women in a family. Therefore, the group will involve predominantly white women with similar ethnic and cultural background.
Establishment of the Structure
Before actual organization of the proposed client group, the workers should pay attention to the way group structure influence the quality of services that agency can provide. In other words, specific attention should be given to the analysis the frequency of counseling sessions, rational for physical arrangement, communication strategies involved into treatment, and finally, type of the proposed of group in terms of changes in size.
The frequency of sessions should be limited to 2 times a week for the working group to keep track of changes and problem that clients experience. Physical arrangements involve size of the room which should not be too large and too small for the group participant to feel involved and have enough personal space.
The arrangement will also include chairs located in a circle for all the participants to see each other during communication. No tables are required because they will be considered as a way of separation between the clients and their counselors.
Because the communication will not involve an individual-centered approach, the worker should learn more about the basic aspects of group communication. The role of a counselor, therefore, is to attract the audience and make them realize the seriousness of their problems.
More importantly, they should engage social learning theories and understand the importance of economic and cultural background for introducing effective treatment of mental disorders. Women, therefore, should realize that their problem base on excess responsibility imposed on their shoulders, they should reconsider their social position and find out alternative roots to solve their problems.
Despite the existing discrepancies within the selected group, the group will not be open to other women. It is important to organize a fixed group of women that can establish trustful relations to make sure that their concern will not go beyond the treatment session.
Identification of Key Content
Before proceeding with the group therapy, it is vital decide what kind of content should be involved into the process of patients’ treatment. To stimulate interaction between group members, it is purposeful to introduce discussion (Shulman, 2005).
The sessions, therefore, can be split into thematic nodes and the role of workers is to encourage members to discuss such topics distribution of responsibility, self-esteem, striking the balance between work and personal development, and rationale for professional growth and personal life. Children upbringing is also among the core topic to be discussed.
Each topic discussed should be accompanied by specific tasks and role games performed during the session. Theoretical and practical frameworks, therefore, can allow the practitioners to understand how well the information is conceived by the clients. It also provide with a better realization of the effectiveness of the proposed content.
In case there are constant difficulties, the practical assignments encourage making certain amendment to the composed plan of treatment.
For instance, to make members activate their abilities and skills and distract them from problems, they should provide their PowerPoint presents of life schedules and plans for the future for them to see what obstacle might appear on way of goals achievement. So, laptops and projector devices are sufficient for conducting therapeutic sessions.
Before inviting potential group members, it is necessary to conduct a survey and study the demographics to find out the percentage of lonely mothers and busy housewives in the area. As soon as the number of women has been defined, it is possible to e-mail potential members and attach a letter where the purpose and treatment details will be presented.
It is also important to attract women who might be reluctant to dedicate their time to these sessions. As soon as agency receives confirmation from clients, they can call them and conduct a phone interview both to encourage them and to ask certain questions concerning their mental problems. Third way to invite this population sample is conduct a survey among the agency’s patients.
The pre-thinking process should also involve preliminary evaluation of the clients. Specifically, the worker should define the number of years that a patient is addicted to medication, number of years suffering from manic depressions, number of children, age of children, marital status, professional occupation, etc.
These backgrounds can be helpful in assigning specific treatment during the group sessions, particularly the frequency of medication intake procedures.
Methodology in Pre-Group Engagement
Identification of working group needs is also essentials because the participants who will monitor clients’ treatment should also be interested in creating a new client group. They should realize the objectives and outcomes of the proposed project to make the corresponding contributions (Shulman, 2005).
What is more importantly, it is necessary to work out subordination system so that to ensure the normal functioning of the group. Hence, there should be two primary therapists for conducting interviews with groups. There should also be on psychiatrist who will serve as an emotional support for group members who wish to expose their problem individually.
Four nurses should be enough to ensure regular intake procedures if necessary. Each nurse should regularly provide their managers with report concerning medication procedures, possible problems, and challenges that members of the group anticipate. Such a manner of daily reporting will help physicians to take a deeper look at the core of the problem (Shulman, 2005).
During psychiatric sessions, there should be two assistants who monitor the behavior of mothers and make notes so as to discuss those with the primary psychiatrists. In this respect, each session should define the ability to functional in a social environment with no medication taken.
Specific factors, including stresses, solitary existence, and financial dependence/independence should also be reconsidered to make connection with mental disorders.
Examination of Agency Context
The main distinction of the proposed client group lies in widening approaches to treatment of mental disorders. Purely psychiatric direction of our agency does not provide physicians with a full range of factors that might influence the aggravation of emotional and psychological states of patients.
Moreover, some of the practitioners may experience difficulties in approaching group treatment because previous practice was directed at individual therapy (Shulman, 2005). Such an approach significantly influence time schedule, quality of procedures, ethical concerns, and confidentiality (Brandler & Roman, 1999). Therefore, it is challengeable to change our workers’ vision of the treatment process.
In the majority of cases, lonely mothers try to separate themselves from society because they believe that people fail to understand the difficulties they had while working and upbringing children. At the same time, housewives are too obsessed with planning and looking after children that they often forget to communicate with surrounding people.
Their habits are limited to household activities living no space for personal upgrading. Therefore, they will not address for help because individual treatment does not provide them with better awareness of their problems. Therefore, the proposed project should attract people striving to deprive themselves of loneliness and find people who share similar challenges.
The agency, however, should be careful while inviting clients because the issues of trust and confidential should come to the forth so as to encourage the participants and make them believe in the efficiency of treatment.
Certainly, the previous working philosophy can confuse the workers involved into a new group project. In order to remove the misconceptions, it is highly advisable to introduce training courses for the practitioners to make sure that they will be able to propose the proper therapy for the participants (Brandler & Roman, 1999).
In addition, a new philosophy should be introduced that would attract more workers because punishment and fines system cannot encourage professionals worker enthusiastically.
Finally, the main strategy to address staff transformation is to introduce training that would allow employees face changes effectively. Change management is vital to meeting the needs of both the workers and the clients.
References
Brandler, S., & Roman, C.P. (1999). Group work: Skills and strategies for effective interventions. New York: Haworth Press.
Shulman, L. (2005). The Skills of Helping Individuals, Families, Groups and Communities with Info Trac (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.