Week 7: Beginning my Onsight Placement

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This week was one of my most successful and productive thus far. I began conducting my interviews with professionals in the space, watched videos that Small Brooklyn Psychology provided, watched a TED Talk giving more in-depth information on parent involvement in anxiety, and learned how to grade certain tests given out by neuropsychologists.

I want to highlight the insightful conversations that I was able to have with the mental health professionals. This past week, I interviewed four therapists and one neuropsychologist. For some context, each of the mental health professionals has a very strong background and tends to work with those ages 7–18. Each therapist communicated their differing approaches, with some focusing more on DBT, others focusing more on CBT, and some working with a combination of the two. In terms of treatment for GAD, CBT is more of the primary focus, but DBT is still used in conjunction. While interviewing, I also learned of other treatment methods, such as ACT (acceptance-based therapy). It is also common practice to keep the parents involved, as it allows the therapist to make sure that the client is both using their skills at home and that the parents are creating a healthy living environment for the patient.

As I stated, I also watched two videos, each an hour long, that were provided by my onsite placement at Small Brooklyn Psychology. The videos, “The ABCs of Evidence-Based Therapy (EBT)” and “Managing Kids’ Distress… and Yours,” each cover different forms of therapy. As I learned, EBT can be categorized as focusing on varying psychological approaches and techniques that are supported by scientific research. The second video goes more in-depth on DBT. It dives into the parent’s role, such as overprotection, where the parent may reinforce a child’s avoidance of uncomfortable situations, which leads to the inhibition of age-appropriate independence. This is an issue as it causes the child to never feel the need to overcome the anxiety. The video also delves into the different distress tolerance skills in DBT, such as the TIPP (Temperature, Intense Exercise, Paced Breathing, Progressive Muscle Relaxation) skills, which help to manage anxiety and distraction with ACCEPTS (Activities, Contributing, Comparisons, Emotions, Pushing Away, Thoughts, and Sensations), which help the individuals distract themselves if they are in a moment of crisis.

The TED Talk that I watched, titled “Rethinking Treatment for Child Anxiety and OCD” by Dr. Eli Lebowitz, covered the parent’s impact on the child’s anxiety. He discusses how, even though parents are hardwired to respond to their children when they are in distress, it is important that the parents tell their children they understand that they are struggling but are sure they can overcome it on their own. This allows the parent to become a supporter instead of a rescuer. Dr. Lebowitz then discusses the SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) treatment. It is important as it allows the child to manage and learn to cope with their anxious emotions on their own, which gives them a sense of independence, which is vital for kids.

Lastly, I began learning the process of grading the ASRS treatment assessment. This will simply allow me to be more involved in the practice and gain an understanding of what neuropsychologists do for their job.

Next week, I plan to continue interviewing the staff, following the questionnaire I used last week. I will also begin researching the potential downsides of various GAD treatments and read the article “Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) as an Unsuccessful Search for Safety.” Finally, I will hopefully garner more responses to my questionnaire. Thank you for reading my blog, and I will update you all next week!