NMT250 final - health psych

• Week 14 focuses on erectile dysfunction, covering counseling and phenomenology.

Assessment and Goal Setting

• Assessment involves gathering patient information and is an ongoing process.
• Information should be collected from different sources.
• Questioning can be seen as an “art,” and used to spur patient’s thinking, stimulate action, and focus patients on their goals.
• Questioning serves an Orienting function.
• Categorizing patients and problems involves diagnosis and identification of issues.
• A list of problems should be created and prioritized by the patient.
• Helpers should select methods and techniques to treat, and co-construct the treatment plan with the patient.
• Goal setting separates the problem into manageable units.
• Goals act as a source of motivation and hope for clients.
• Every visit should have a focus
• Goals help to know when the relationship should end

Effective Goal Setting

• Goals should be specific, positively stated, simple, and concrete.
• Clear goals lead to better progress.
• Turning problems into goals can improve motivation.
• Concrete goals are especially important for demoralized clients, with consideration given to measuring frequency, duration, and intensity.
• Behavioral goals should be concrete, measurable, and observable, demonstrating the effectiveness of the helping relationship.
• Not all goals need to be behavioral if they are are specific and clear, simple and concrete, and positively stated.
• Patients must be willing to take responsibility for the problem, their feelings, and the goal.
• It is important patients are motivated and “own” the goals.
• Patients feeling part of the team can contribute positively towards treatment.
• Goal achievement indicates when the work is done or when future sessions can move on to new problems.
• Goals should be important to the patient and personally meaningful goals can help patients work harder.
• Realistic goals should be doable or achievable.
• Questions can be used in goal setting to make the goal more specific, turn a problem into a goal, determine a goal’s importance or to enhance collaboration.

Effective Problem Solving

• Step One: Summarize and enumerate the issues while agreeing on content.
• Step Two: Ask the client to identify the most crucial issues, using closed questions to prioritise problems.
• Step Three: Select the focal problem, focusing on only one or two issues at a time.
• Step Four: Change the problem to a goal using solution-focused questioning.
• Step Five: Ensuring the client and helper are clear, restate and clarify the final goal statement.

Phenomenology of Erectile Dysfunction

• Erectile dysfunction's psychological consequences for the individual can include: emasculation, humiliation, perceived inability to please partners, fear of abandonment, apprehension about new relationships, and performance anxiety.
• Erectile dysfunction's psychological consequences for the partner can include: a complex mixture of rejection, guilt, feeling unloved, shame, frustration, and withdrawing from sex.

Counselling Patients and Partners

• It is important to address erectile dysfunction as a shared sexual problem of both heterosexual and same-sex relationships.
• Encouraging the patient to bring their partner facilitates a relational assessment and a unified approach.
• Identify norms that are specific to the couple.
• High-quality sexual education addresses potential faulty knowledge.
• Open and honest discussion of sexual functioning is needed.
• Encourage couples to "avoid" avoidance.
• Effective communication skills, such as empathic/reflective listening, de-escalation, and reframing, should be used.
• Referral to a behavioral specialist should be considered.