Tag Archives: Big Sky Youth Empowerment

Group therapy, Personal Reflections, Writing

Teaching Group Counseling

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I forgot how much I love teaching group counseling.

Maybe I forgot because I haven’t taught Group Counseling at the University of Montana since 2017. Whatever the reason, last week, I remembered.

I remembered because I got to provide a group-oriented counseling training to seven very cool program managers and staff of the Big Sky Youth Empowerment program in Bozeman. We started with a structured question and answer opening, followed with a self-reflective debrief, and then re-started with a different version of the same opening so we could engage in a second self-reflective debrief. I’ve used this opening several times when teaching group; it’s getting better every time.

I love the experiential part where I get to flit back and forth between process facilitator and contributor. I love the opportunity to quote Irvin Yalom about the “self-reflective loop” and “The group leader is the norm-setter and role model.” Then I love getting to quote Yalom again, “Cohesion is the attraction of the group for its members.”  And again, “I have a dilemma . . .” Boom. When teaching group counseling, the Yalom quotes never stop!

Groups are about individuals and groups and individuals’ learning from the power of groups. I get to learn and re-learn about strong openings, monopolizers, closing for consolidation, and the natural temptation of everyone in the group to fix other group members’ problems—and the need for group facilitators to tightly manage the problem-solving process. We get to “go vertical” and back out through linking and then “go horizontal.”

Tomorrow I head back to Bozeman for more training with the fabulous BYEP staff. Part of the day we’ll focus on specific group facilitation techniques, which reminded me of a handout I created back in 2017. The handout lists and provides examples for 18 different group counseling techniques/strategies. For anyone interested, the group techniques handout is here:

basic-group-counseling-responses-2022Download

I hope you’re all having a great Memorial Day and engaging in something that feels like just the right amount of meaningful or remembrance for you on this important holiday when we recognize individuals who made huge sacrifices for the sake of the greater and common good of the group.

All my best,

John

Clinical Interviewing, Suicide Assessment and Intervention

The Montana Suicide Assessment and Treatment Planning Model is Coming to a Location Near You

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While hanging out on Twitter, I noticed that E. David Klonsky, a fancy suicide researcher from the University of British Columbia tweeted about a brand new article published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

The article, titled, “Rethinking suicides as mental accidents” makes a case for what the authors (Drs Ajdacic-Grossab, Hepp, Seifritz, and Bopp from Switzerland) refer to as the starting point for a “Rethink.”

Aside from their very cool use of the term rethink—a term I’m planning to adopt and overuse in the future—the authors’ particular “rethink” has to do with reformulating completed suicides as mental accidents, instead of mental illness. They concluded, “The mental accident paradigm provides an interdisciplinary starting point in suicidology that offers new perspectives in research, prediction and prevention” (p. 141).

For those of you who follow this blog and know me a bit, it will come as no surprise that I commend the authors for moving away from the term mental illness, but that I also think they should move even further away from even the scent of pathologizing suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

All this brings me to an important announcement.

Starting on the evening of May 16 and continuing onto May 17, in partnership with the Big Sky Youth Empowerment Project (thanks Pete and Katie), I’ll begin the launch of some public and professional suicide trainings in Montana. These trainings will include evening public lectures (starting May 16 in Bozeman) and professional trainings on suicide assessment and treatment planning (starting May 17 in Bozeman).

Going back to the “rethink” of suicide as a mental accident, I want to emphasize that my goal with these lectures and workshops is to reshape discussions about suicide from illness-focused to health and wellness focused. Rethink of it as a strength-based approach to suicide assessment and treatment planning. And you can also rethink of it as no accident.

For more information on the public lecture, check out this flyer: BYEPSAWpublic (1)

For more information on the professional suicide assessment and treatment planning workshop, check out this link: https://go.byep.org/advances and flyer: BYEPSAWclinical (1)

And if you can’t make these events, no worries, as I mentioned, this is a launch . . . which means there’s more coming later this year . . . in Billings, in Great Falls, and in Missoula.

Finally, if you want a workshop like this in your city, let me know. The good people of Big Sky Youth Empowerment are committed to delivering a more positive message about suicide assessment and treatment planning to other locations around the state; maybe we can partner up and do some important work together.

Thanks for reading and happy Sunday evening!

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