According to the article by Clarke, L & Brooks, A (2011), nurses are supposed to have knowledge and they should develop competencies which are consistent with the current evidence and validated research. Therefore mental health nurses are supposed to practice therapies which lead to predictable outcome which are normally taken to be cognitive behavioral in nature. This article acknowledges the tolerance of ambiguity and many other complexities in therapeutic encounters and it also suggests that many clients do not tolerate mechanistic therapies.
According to Clarke, L & Brooks, A (2011) clients know better how to proceed in therapy than their therapist. There are three core conditions for effective client centered counseling which are genuineness where the therapist is supposed to be open and honest when relating to their clients, unconditional regard where therapist are supposed to view their clients as people entitled to care and respect and empathetic understanding whereby the therapist is supposed to be sensitive to the feelings of the clients.
Attribution theory is a commonsense psychology that explains how people interpret events or the motive of other people and how the behaviors of this people are affected by the interpretations. According to Clarke, L & Brooks, A (2011) the behaviors of people can derive from external factors but this only apply to those people who the analysis is focusing on.
There are some situations which appear to be caused by people, others happen without people being involved at all and others are influenced by people, therefore events can be attributed positively, neutrally and negatively. This means that those people who doubt themselves are less likely to attribute the events or behaviors to the external factors and they are normally prevented by inverse psychology from the reasoning responsibility away from themselves which means that they internally attribute in order to gain self control. People with little control over the events are usually less protected from depression (Clarke, L & Brooks, A 2011).
This people have learned helplessness which can be described as quitting response which believes that whatever you do does not matter. The manner in which people explain to themselves why the events have happened is referred to as explanatory style and it is a modulator of learned helplessness. The relationship between the clients and the therapist need common understanding more than common feelings and this includes emphasis on the cognition of the client. Attribution theory is helpful when addressing the misunderstanding of the client about their distress. People who are depressed tend to make internal attributions for the negative symptoms that they might have and they make external attributions for the positive symptoms. People usually perceive success which is due to ability as being more stable than success which is due to effort. Stability is perceived of being stronger for ability than effort.
This perception in therapeutic context influences the self esteem of the client, how they cope with hopelessness and how they control their emotion in a social setting. According to Clarke, L & Brooks, A (2011) “because of the fact that people seek causal mechanisms for negative life events, it is useful to identify cognitive attributions in treating disorders which are related to stress.” the emotional bond between the client and the therapist influences the therapeutic judgment. In conclusion attribution theory can be referred to as the philosophically defensible method in which humanistic care is made to be more practically accountable.
Reference
Clarke, L & Brooks, A (2011). Combining client centered therapy with attribution theory Mental health practice 14 (9)
