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Cecile Brennan

Decision making

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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Ensuring Ethical Practice: Guidelines For Mental Health Counselors In Private Practice, Cecile Brennan Jun 2013

Ensuring Ethical Practice: Guidelines For Mental Health Counselors In Private Practice, Cecile Brennan

Cecile Brennan

Since mental health counselors in private practice often work in relative isolation, it is especially important that they attend to ethical issues. This article reviews four dimensions of ethical knowledge: the foundation of ethical actions, counselors as agents of ethical action, the need to establish a decision-making process, and the importance of sustaining ethical practice by keeping current with clinical developments and attending to their own well-being.


Improving Awareness Of Vulnerabilities To Ethical Challenges: A Family Systems Approach, Cecile Brennan, Jennifer Eulberg, Paula Britton Dec 2010

Improving Awareness Of Vulnerabilities To Ethical Challenges: A Family Systems Approach, Cecile Brennan, Jennifer Eulberg, Paula Britton

Cecile Brennan

Current ethical decision-making models focus principally on cognitive factors and less on the emotional aspects of ethical challenges. This practice reflects a reliance on knowledge-driven, modernist approaches that emphasize objectivity and the primacy of rational thinking. Newer postmodern and constructivist approaches emphasize the need to consider the counselor holistically, as a thinking/feeling being who brings into the present moment the accumulated weight of the past. In order to bridge the gap between a cognitive, modernist approach and a feeling, experience-based postmodern approach, the authors outline an instructional approach that uses family systems theory to assist counselors in becoming conscious about …