Group therapy is second most useful for social work practitioners among 26 other intervention techniques, according to NASW annual report in 1985(Middleman & Wood, 1990, 91).
Social work practitioners in Korea need to make more efforts to improve gr...
Group therapy is second most useful for social work practitioners among 26 other intervention techniques, according to NASW annual report in 1985(Middleman & Wood, 1990, 91).
Social work practitioners in Korea need to make more efforts to improve group therapy techniques for various thematic groups.
In this article, this researcher presents one session of ongoing group therapy at a day hospital. The article introduces the clinical supervision aimed at improving group dynamics and interventions made to contial acting out behaviors in the group. Eight patients varied as to their age(17~38) and gender(5 female, 3 male). All were diagnosed as schizophrenia. This researcher provided supervision of this particular session lead by the senior social worker and the primary psychiatrist.
The group initially struggled with one member's acting-out behavior. Both leaders provided appropriate modeling, and the leader's non-verbal communication seemed culturally appropriate.
When a member acts out, or an angry member overwhelms the group, the leader should use the technique of reducing emotions. Verbally minimize the behavior. The leader said, "You seemed angry." The minimizing technique might have been, "You seemed a little bit frustrated."
Another issue was with another memeber who phoned others too often. The leaders and members are all frustrated by her behavior. The group could use this opportunity to build a group norm, such as what's acceptable telephone usage.
The theme of this group seems to be clear. Undesirable behaviors-such as inappropriately expressed anger and too frequent phone calls-should not be tolerated by group members. The leaders have used individual intervention especially with confrontation technique to increase group member's self-awareness.
The leaders might find different results with group-level-intervention as well as interpersonal-level-intervention. Group-level-intervention will increase group's cohesiveness as well as collective improvement in awareness. Interpersonal-level-intervention will assist group members to build positive interaction with each other.