Counseling Model vs. the Therapy Model in Schools

The public school system has increasingly dealt with children with emotional, behavioral, and mental health problems by placing them in special education, rather than removing them from the schools. This is the result of both legislative mandate and parental pressure to provide appropriate public education for all students. The issues with these students are different than issues for students who have developmental delays, hearing and vision problems, or other physical issues, although some of these students may also have behavioral issues that teachers must address.

Just to give a sense of the magnitude of the problem in the school system, it might be helpful to look at the situation in one state. Washington State recently released a report on the emotional and behavioral problems among Washington state children (Madden, 2000). The report indicated that approximately 64,800 children and adolescents in the state show signs of behavioral and emotional problems that are serious enough to warrant some form of treatment. This breaks down to 1 in 18 children from age 6-11 and 1 in 15 adolescents from age 12-17 have some form of diagnosable mental illness, according to the most recent DSM categories. Boys, children from single parent families, and low-income children are more likely to have either behavioral or emotional problems that need to be addressed. Race and ethnicity do not appear t

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dentify those behaviors which work for the client within his or her system. For example, deShazer (1985) noted that people are often so focused on what they view as problems that they do not notice those instances in which the problem does not occur and build upon that. What deShazer and other solution-focused counselors recommend is for families, schools, counselors, and others to look for what is working and reinforce that. This helps the client see himself or herself in other terms. It supports an image of success, rather than an image of continual failure. The basic focus is on looking for what is working well behaviorally and setting up the system so that more of that situation exists, allowing the child to succeed more and more often. This reinforces the strengths that the child does have and also reinforces the belief that people do have the skills that they need to solve their own problems. On the other hand, deShazer (1985) indicated that there are clearly things that do not work. If they do not work, then they should not be repeated, but replaced with a different situation or operation. This is part of the systems approach, which acknowledges that systems tend to get stuck. If they get stuck, the need is not fo
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Approximate Word count = 3560
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)