News

Child sexual assualt: Prevention, identifying and surviving.

Listen to the WKOK Roundtable with Dr. Tony Butto, Dr. Teresa Buzzini and Glenn Jacobson

  • 1070 WKOK
  • Original Air Date: Nov 20, 2011

PSU scandal III: Help for victims

SELINSGROVE – What happened at Penn State University with assistant coach Jerry Sandusky can be a learning experience for many. Tony Butto, psychologist and head of the Courtyard Counseling Center in Selinsgrove, says the publicity surrounding the case can have quite an impact in a number of areas. Butto says it’s opened up a lot of painful memories for people who are victims.

Butto says the publicity might encourage victims to come out of the shadows and begin to talk about their experiences. Also, for those who are still victims, Butto hopes it gives them confidence to speak out about those who have hurt them.

Butto says sexual abuse is very devastating on anyone. He says it can set into motion a lifetime of pain and doubt. Butto says it can create profound confusion about their personal security, especially in relationships. Abuse also can trigger depression and anxiety and destructive behavior. Often times, Butto says there is guilt involved in adults who were abused as children.

Read online at WKOK News

  • Ali Stevens
  • 1070 WKOK
  • November 11th, 2011

Psychotherapy is effective and here’s why

Psychotherapy works, and the science and research are there to back it up, said Bruce E. Wampold, PhD, at the APA 2011 Annual Convention symposium, “Psychotherapy Effectiveness: What Makes it Work?”

Answering just what makes it work is complex, said Wampold, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but relationships and customized treatments play key roles.

Read more at APA.org

  • A. Brownawell and K. Kelley
  • Monitor on Psychology
  • October 2011, Vol 42, No. 9
  • Print version: page 14

Online Therapy Isn’t Shrinking

The idea of online therapy has lots of folks in the industry wondering whether it’s any better than Lucy Van Pelt hanging up a sign reading, “Psychiatric Help 5 cents.”

Online therapy is dangerous, critics say. Quacks could set up shop and scam customers. Discontents who are looking for a quick fix could score drugs with a simple mouseclick. The entire mental health industry may degenerate into a Geraldo Riverian mess. At a Capitol Hill news conference last week, a coalition of medical practitioners and patient advocates released a set of guidelines to keep that from happening before the government gets a chance to step in and do it for them. But critics say those standards might not be enough, and warn that mixing professional counseling with the Internet is a potentially volatile situation that the government is not likely to ignore.

The guidelines — the eHealth Code of Ethics — aren’t revolutionary. They’re voluntary rules drawn up by the Internet Healthcare Coalition that ask the players in this field (and in the electronic health field in general) to stay the course and follow a set of standards that some sites say they were already following.

The rules ask sites — of which there are an estimated 300 — to disclose financial ties they may have with other companies or organizations and to protect patients’ privacy and let them know exactly how their information will be used.

Gunny Cho, CEO of the online therapy site Here2listen.com, said his company was already adhering to the guidelines suggested in the new code.

“We were taking the highest of the high moral ground,” he said.

Cho said most of the people who use Stanford University-backed Here2Listen’s fee-based, real-time chat service are looking for help with personal relationships and life’s stresses. None of them will be hooked up with drugs, he said, because Here2Listen’s shrinks are there to listen, not prescribe.

Cho is a businessman, though, and has no background in the mental health field.

Psychology-ethics expert Thomas Nagy is wary of how his field is embracing the Internet as a clinical medium.

The assistant clinical professor at Stanford Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, who maintains a private practice as a psychologist in Palo Alto, says online therapy is rife with risks.

“There’s no training or research in Internet therapy, and there’s no definition of what it is,” he said.

He said face-to-face counseling, or at least telephonic therapy, is always superior to online therapy.

“With words on a screen you have such a narrow bandwidth of emotional overtones,” he said. “I would always argue for telephone consultation instead of email therapy. I think there’s so much more information available, you can at least tell something about (a patient’s) emotional tone.”

Glenn Marron, a psychologist who maintains a private practice in New York and once served as consultant to the government, agreed that the industry is moving quicker than it should.

“I think there’s no question that ultimately this indeed is going to be one of the main formats for mental health,” she said. “The technology is far more advanced than the infrastructure and guidelines we have.”

“The mental health industry has been moving toward “telehealth” – the use of electronic communications and IT to support clinical care — for years. The U.S. Department of Commerce says telehealth is employed by the mental health industry more than any other health field.

Both Nagy and Marron are concerned that a patient might have signs of symptoms or disabilities that would be invisible to a therapist communicating via email and chat. No code, they said, is going to change that.

  • By Lynn Burke
  • Wired
  • 2000-05-30

Psychotherapy Helps Teens Control Diabetes

By Megan Rauscher

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Adolescents with poorly controlled diabetes do better with a program of intensive, home-based, family-centered psychotherapy, according to new research.

Teens with type 1 diabetes, which requires regular insulin injections and careful monitoring of blood sugar levels, have been considered “very difficult to manage clinically,” Dr. Deborah A. Ellis told Reuters Health.

“Our study showed that families were willing to receive behavioral treatment when it was provided in their home and that such intensive behavioral interventions can result in improved outcomes,” she said.

In their study, reported in the journal Diabetes Care, Ellis from Wayne State University in Detroit and colleagues randomly assigned 127 adolescents with a history of poorly controlled type 1 diabetes to standard medical care only or to standard medical care plus 6 months of an intervention targeting problems related to adherence to diabetes treatment.

The behavioral intervention was successful in improving diabetes control, the team reports. Average long-term blood sugar control improved to a degree that was both statistically significant and clinically meaningful, Ellis and colleagues note.

The strategy led to more frequent blood glucose testing. “Frequent testing of blood glucose has been linked to better metabolic control and may therefore account for the improvements in metabolic control experienced by the group,” the investigators write.

This study shows that home-based therapy “holds promise in improving the diabetes management and metabolic control of adolescents,” the team concludes, but they point out that longer follow up is needed to see whether the effects are long-lasting.

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, July 2005

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Gary Direnfeld, MSW, RSW maintains a wonderful collection of articles relating to parenting, and marriage and family.

Check out www.yoursocialworker.com