Mental health articles

BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSULTATION The impetus for mental health services to move beyond the clinic setting to improve treatment outcomes fueled movements to develop methods of consultation. These early efforts at consulting began as a means of offering an alternate response to meeting the community’s mental health needs when scarce professional resources meant that many […]

Organizational Consultation or Development Organizational development (OD) is the application of behavioral science knowledge in a long-range effort to improve an organization’s ability to cope with change in its external environment and increase its problem-solving capabilities . Massarik and Pei-Carpenter (2002) offer the following working definition of OD: In the context of continuing natural change […]

Program Consultation In program consultation, a mental health professional provides services to a key figure in an agency or organization for the purposes of assisting in the planning of a new program, evaluating and revising an existing program, or in dealing with the factors that affect a current program (e.g., a community mental health center […]

Consultation-Liaison Consultation-liaison work refers to a mental health professional in a hospital setting who consults with medical professionals on psychological matters. The liaison works with other disciplines (e.g., medicine, nursing, and social work) to detect, treat, refer, or some combination of these three, those patients who have mental health or stressrelated issues, especially those that […]

Consultation is a complex competency that overlaps with all the other aspects of mental health practice: management, supervision, therapy, assessment, diversity/relationship, research/basic science. The development of consultation skills involves integrating these various specialty areas. However, one must keep in mind important differences in how these areas of competency are applied in consultation: • Management: A […]

Core Characteristics of Consultation 1. Either the consultee or the client system may be given priority over the other at a given time, depending on the approach to consultation that is taken. 2. The consultant provides indirect service to the client system by providing direct service to the consultee. 3. A consultant can be either […]

Approximately 30 years ago, consulting psychology began to emerge from the shadowof clinical psychology. It became a truly interdisciplinary field, borrowing and integratingconcepts, models, and research from business, organizational behavior, generalsystems theory, group dynamics, action research, community mental health,family systems, and social psychology, in addition to the “godparent” fields of clinicalpsychology, counseling psychology, social psychology, […]

Consultation generally involves three parties: the consultant, the consultee, and the client. The consultee is the individual with whom the consultant works directly. The client is the individual or group with whom the consultee works. For consultation in clinical settings, the consultee may be a mental health provider who has little experience with a particular […]