Comprehensive exams for Mental Health Q 89
Which client outcome is most appropriately achieved in a community approach setting in psychiatric nursing?
A. The client performs activities of daily living and learns about crafts.
B. The client is able to prevent aggressive behavior and monitors his use of medications.
C. The client demonstrates self-reliance and social adaptation.
D. The client experiences anxiety relief and learns about his symptoms.
Correct Answer: C. The client demonstrates self-reliance and social adaptation.
A therapeutic community is designed to help individuals assume responsibility for themselves, to learn how to respect and communicate with others, and to interact in a positive manner. The therapeutic community (TC) is an intensive and comprehensive treatment model developed for use with adults that has been modified successfully to treat adolescents with substance use disorders.
Option A: The core goal of TCs has always been to promote a more holistic lifestyle and to identify areas for change such as negative personal behaviors–social, psychological, and emotional–that can lead to substance use. Residents make these changes by learning from fellow residents, staff members, and other figures of authority.
Option B: The theoretical framework for the TC model considers substance use a symptom of much broader problems and, in a residential setting, uses a holistic treatment approach that has an impact on every aspect of a resident’s life. Residents are distinguished along dimensions of psychological dysfunction and social deficits. The community provides habilitation, in which some TC residents develop socially productive lifestyles for the first time in their lives, and rehabilitation, in which other residents are helped to return to a previously known and practiced or rejected healthy lifestyle (De Leon, 1994).
Option D: The remaining answer choices may be outcomes of psychiatric treatment, but the use of a therapeutic community approach is concerned with the promotion of self-reliance and cooperative adaptation to being with others. Part of the ecological approach to treatment in the TC is the creation of a safe and nurturing environment, within which adolescents can begin to experience healthy living. It is important for the staff of the TC to understand what type of home, neighborhood, and social environment from which each adolescent comes. Many adolescents enrolled in the TC come from unsafe physical and psychological environments; the characteristics of the home and neighborhood do not facilitate healthy living, and many risk factors may be environmental.