Mental health articles

Many simple problems of academic underachievement yield rather quickly
to active short-term counseling, tutoring, or workshop interventions, so
long as the student is motivated for change and does not have significant
cognitive limitations or emotional interferences. Longer-term psychotherapeutic
interventions can effectively remove psychological blocks to
academic performance but require greater investment of time, energy, and
resolvable emotional upset. The central principle is to conjoin efficiency
and effectiveness, conducting whatever intervention is most effective
with the least amount of time and effort, with the following refinements
added:

1. Interventions must be guided by thorough theoretical knowledge
and mastery of empirical research.
2. Counselors’ aim should be to help individual students become
themselves more truly and deeply. As students do not fi t snugly into
theoretical boxes, they require individualized responsiveness.
3. No single tradition in psychology, psychiatry, or education has a privileged
path to the truth or to eff ective practice. Th e main traditions that
still speak to practitioners—psychoanalytic, interpersonal, behavioral,
cognitive, experiential, and biological—all have important
contributions to make. Th e sophisticated practitioner is neither hidebound
nor unselectively “eclectic”: Th e ideal is pluralistic knowledge
(Havens, 1973) and understanding of the diff erential applicability of
each of these theoretical models and modes of intervention.