Client-Centered Reasoning: Narratives of People with Mental Illness

How can you motivate and prepare students for the complex process of developing clinical reasoning and problem-solving skills when working with people with mental illness?

Client-Centered Reasoning: Narratives of People with Mental Illness puts you on the right path to understanding your clients who have impaired functioning due to mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Inside these pages you will find stories written by clients along with stories and daily logs written by occupational therapy interns about their clients and about their internship experiences in mental health settings. Through her analysis of the writings, the author challenges you to enhance your analytical thinking.

Using these narratives, logs, activities, role-play exercises, and clinical analyses, this book offers a real-life approach that helps you learn how to alleviate the fears and prejudices you may have in working with this population and allows you to better understand the issues clients face living with their illness. Topics include suicide, manic depression, substance abuse, violence, aggression, and hyper-sexuality, as well as clients' rights.

No matter what your profession, if you work with mentally ill clients, this book is an invaluable tool that will help you become better prepared to provide effective mental health intervention.

Dr. Pat Precin is Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy at Touro College, consultant, and licensed psychoanalyst with a private practice in Manhattan. Dr. Precin has over 27 years of experience working with people with mental illness and has directly supervised over 175 occupational therapy practitioner students in various clinical settings. She has authored and edited a number of books, including Living Skills Recovery Workbook, in addition to numerous journal articles, chapters, and grants.