high stake client

For every client session (which typically lasts 60-75mins) that my female owner has, she puts in at least twice as much time preparing for it. After seeing a few clients, she’s getting into the hang of conducting intake interviews for her parent clients. She now has to move on to the next stage of therapy – case formulation based on the information provided by her clients. That takes more brainwork apparently, coz it’s like trying to solve a mystery.

Right now, she’s preparing to do an intake interview for an adult male client she’s going to see tomorrow. It’s a “high-stake” client as it’s the only non-parent adult she would be allocated with (coz she’s actually attached to the parenting clinic but needs to work with a non-parenting adult client). Using this client, she needs to video-tape the first session and complete intake interview within one session (most newbies can’t do that because clients tend to talk too much). Then, she needs to submit the video recording to her clinical supervisor who would assess her clinical competencies. She also needs to do a case formulation of the client and present it to her supervisor for discussion in order to get a pass. Following this, she has to write up a detailed case formulation report to submit to her lecturer for marking.

Based on the same client (hopefully), she needs to video-tape a session where she is teaching him some CBT techniques and write a critique of the session before submitting it to another lecturer for marking. All these, within a very limited time frame.

High stakes indeed. I wonder how her male client would react, if he knows how much she depends on him to complete assignments across two modules (this is not even counting the internship). She should just get a friend to pretend to be a client…