Hernandez Family Assessment Discussion 3

Assessment is as essential to family therapy as it is to individual therapy. Although families often present with one person identified as the “problem,” the assessment process will help you better understand family roles and determine whether the identified problem client is in fact the root of the family’s issues. As you examine the Hernandez Family: Sessions 1-6 videos in this week’s Learning Resources, consider how you might assess and treat the client family.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

Assess client families presenting for psychotherapy

To prepare:

Review this week’s Learning Resources and reflect on the insights they provide on family assessment.

View the Hernandez Family: Sessions 1-6 videos, and consider how you might assess the family in the case study.

Note: For guidance on writing a comprehensive client assessment, refer to pages 137–142 of Wheeler (2014) in this week’s Learning Resources.

The Assignment

Address in a comprehensive client assessment of the Hernandez family the following:

Demographic information

Presenting problem

History or present illness

Past psychiatric history

Medical history

Substance use history

Developmental history

Family psychiatric history

Psychosocial history

History of abuse and/or trauma

Review of systems

Physical assessment

Mental status exam

Differential diagnosis

Case formulation

Treatment plan

Note: Any item you are unable to address from the video should be marked “needs to be added to” as you would in an actual comprehensive client assessment

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.