Helping Clients Make Informed Decisions - Get Instant Homework

Please no plagiarism and make sure you are able to access all resources on your own before you bid. Main references come from Murray, C., Pope, A., & Willis, B. (2017) and/or American Psychological Association (2014). You need to have scholarly support for any claim of fact or recommendation regarding treatment. APA format also requires headings. Use the instructions each week to guide your heading titles and organize the content of your initial post under the appropriate headings. Remember to use scholarly research from peer-reviewed articles that is current. Please follow the instructions to get full credit for the discussion. I need this completed by 04/02/20 at 8pm.

Discussion – Week 6

Helping Clients Make Informed Decisions

According to the ACA Code of Ethics, the “primary responsibility of counselors is to respect the dignity and to promote the welfare of clients” (Standard A.1.a). Counselors also should be “aware of—and avoid imposing—their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees, and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.” (Standard A.4.b). Keeping both points in mind, counselors must sometimes help clients make informed decisions about behavior that is harmful to themselves and, potentially, others. Whether or not to use contraception is one potential area related to sexuality counseling for which counselors may need to inform clients about the potential risks.

Base your responses to this week’s Discussion on the following case study:

You are a counselor working in a college counseling center. You just completed your intake evaluation session with Josiah, a 20-year-old sophomore. Josiah was mandated to attend six counseling sessions after he received a citation from the campus police for underage drinking at a party sponsored by the fraternity to which Josiah belongs.

During the intake session, Josiah was very verbal and willing to share information about his background and current experiences. He shared with you that he frequently drinks six to eight beers or other alcoholic beverages at a time, typically every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday when he “parties with my friends.” He described this as normal behavior among his peer group, saying that this is “just how we unwind from all the stress of school every week.”

When you asked Josiah about his relationships and sexual behaviors, he stated that he has not had a steady partner since high school, saying, “People here just aren’t into long-term relationships.” He admitted that he typically “hooks up” with at least one or two partners each weekend, and when you asked him what he meant by that, he said, “Sex.” You asked if he uses any contraception in these sexual encounters, and he said, “No, I don’t like how they feel, so I won’t have sex if the other person would make me use one.”

You asked Josiah what his goals are for counseling and what he would like to change, and he responded, “Not much really. I like my life and have fun with all the partying we do here. I guess I need to learn to be a little more careful with my drinking since I got that police citation, but otherwise, I feel really happy with my life right now and can’t think of much that I really want to work on in counseling.”

With these thoughts in mind:

Post by Day 4

· an explanation of how you, as a counselor, might help this student make healthy, informed sexual decisions.

· Describe one specific strategy you might use or one example conversation you might have with him (in the form of a short dialogue) to help him change his sexual behavior.

· Explain why the strategy or conversation you described might be effective.

Be sure to support your postings and responses with specific references to the Learning Resources.

Required Resources

Readings

· Article: American Counseling Association (ACA). (2014). ACA Code of Ethics. Retrieved from http://www.counseling.org/docs/ethics/2014-aca-code-of-ethics.pdf?sfvrsn=4

· Article: Altshuler, A. L., Ojanen-Goldsmith, A., Blumenthal, P. D., & Freedman, L. R. (2017). A good abortion experience: A qualitative exploration of women’s needs and preferences in clinical care. Social Science & Medicine, 191, 109–116. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

· Article: Coast, E., Norris, A. H., Moore, A. M., & Freeman, E. (2018). Review article: Trajectories of women’s abortion-related care: A conceptual framework. Social Science & Medicine, 200, 199–210. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

· Article: Edwards, A., & Seck, M. M. (2018). Ethnicity, Values, and Value Conflicts of African American and White Social Service Professionals. Journal of Social Work Values & Ethics, 15(2), 37–47. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

· Article: Hoggart, L. (2015). Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy. Sociology Compass, 9(5), 365–378. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.
Sociology Compass 9/5 (2015): 365–378, 10.1111/soc4.12256

Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

Lesley Hoggart* Health and Social Care, The Open University

Abstract This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women’s reproductive bodies have become a setting for political strug- gle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio-legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women’s abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women’s decision-making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio-cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non-judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.

Introduction

This article examines the issue of abortion counselling as a site of policy debate, in which women’s reproductive bodies have become a setting of political struggle. In seeking to understand why a seemingly straightforward subject –whether women undergoing an abortion should have access to counselling services – has become so contentious, it is necessary to con- sider a wide range of other issues. An over-arching requirement is to consider how the debate is socio-culturally located. This means understanding that policy debates on abortion counsel- ling are conceptualised differently within different socio-legal frameworks; within gendered social norms; and within contentious political discourses. Even the phrase itself – abortion counselling – has been subject to a number of discursive shifts and invested with multiple mean- ings which are complex and malleable. Above all, as this paper will show, different strands of academic debate around abortion counselling customarily proceed from particular political positioning, and with an eye to the political implications of research interpretations. There is an undeniable relationship between political beliefs on abortion and intellectual framing on the issue of abortion counselling. These broader sociological issues frame this paper, which focuses on Britain1 as a case study explicating the relationship between socio-cultural contexts and different politics, policies and practices. Britain, in recent years, has experienced repeated f lurries of political debate and activity

around the issue of pre-abortion counselling. Between October 2006 and June 2007, two Ten Minute Rule Bills that proposed mandatory counselling were rejected by the British Parliament, and in 2012, the MPs Frank Field and Nadine Dorries proposed amendments to the National Health Service (NHS) and Social Care Bill 2011 which would have removed

counselling services from abortion providers and obliged women to receive counselling from ‘independent’ bodies before an abortion.2

Abortion counselling as an issue is worthy of exploration because, as the paper also sets out, developments in this area affect abortion provision and thus have an effect upon women under- going an abortion. Although a straightforward policy question would address what provision should look like in this area, such questions have always been bound up in wider political debates about the morality of abortion and views on its legal status. In academia, important contributions to the debate, from sociology, have come from Ellie Lee, who has consistently shown how sociological constructions – of women, of abortion and of abortion providers – have informed the legal regulation of abortion in Britain (Lee 1998, 2003a,b, 2004). Kristin Luker (1984, 1996) and Rosalind Petchesky (1986) have pioneered sociological work in this area internationally. Although fundamentally an issue of concern to political sociologists, many more disciplines are involved in contributing towards literature of relevance to the issue of abortion counselling, including important contributions from psychology (Boyle 1997; MacLeod 2011); law ( Jackson 2001; Sheldon 1997); and policy research (Allen 1985; Hoggart 2003, 2012; Rowlands 2008). This paper reviews three areas of literature, all of which straddle these disciplines….