Group and Family Therapy
Respond by suggesting strategies to address the legal and ethical considerations your colleagues discussed. Support your responses with evidence-based literature.
(Positive comment)
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Legal and Ethical Considerations for Group and Family Therapy
Legal and Ethical Considerations for Group and Family Therapy differ from those for Individual Therapy.
So far, we’ve explored “talk cure” or psychotherapy introduced by Sigmund Freud, which helped and treated clients suffering from a variety of mental health issues using individual therapy. The skills learned in the above therapy are now applied to group and family therapy. In other words, we use the experience from a unit and expand it to a group, or from an element to a set, in order to multiply it benefits. Some legal and/or ethical implications related to counseling clients in an individual therapy session is the right to confidentiality, which is extended when we are in a group, since “what is said in the group stay in the group.” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2014). But we should go without ignoring that in group therapy, there is a challenge of maintaining the confidentiality and the disclosure of private information without client consent can harm the therapeutic relationship (McClanahan, 2014).
In individual therapy, the client is in a private session and receives one-on-one attention from the therapist, who develops an individualized approach to helping him/her. The therapeutic alliance is strong, and the client develops self-awareness, self-exploration, and identifying boundaries. In group and family therapy, more than one client treated at the same time by the therapist(s). Here, the principle of universality of Dr. Irvin Yalom is validated where the members of the group are allowed to realize that they are not alone and that other individuals share similar problems and struggles. Members receive support from others, get many different points of view, and develop communication and socialization skills. This group allows members to learn how to express their issues and accept criticism from others. Some members can model successful behaviors of others’ individuals as they learn by copying or imitating others’ actions (American Addiction Centers, 2019). Group therapy is affordable to clients without insurance and enables the therapist to see many clients in a shorter amount of time (Wheeler, 2014, p.415).
