Herbert Rappaport

Future Time, Death Anxiety, and Life Purpose among Older Adults.

Abstract Male and female residents of a retirement community (N = 58), ranging in age from 52 to 94, were administered the Rappaport Time Line, the Death Anxiety Scale, and the Purpose-in-Life Test. Significant degrees of association were hypothesized to exist between temporality, death anxiety, and purpose in life. Correlational analyses supported the bask assumptions of this investigation: life purpose and death anxiety were found to be negatively correlated, life purpose was found to correlate positively with projection of future time, and death anxiety was positively correlated with temporal density in the present. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed for elderly populations.

Do therapists bias their ratings of patient functioning under peer review

The present study was an attempt to examine the rating bias of therapists participating in an evaluation of an experimental quality assurance, system at a community mental health center. The test program was intended to identify patients who demonstrated lack of progress or poor level of functioning after two months of treatment, and to employ a clinical assessment process by independent clinicians to evaluate problems in the quality of care.It was believed that the therapists knowledge that they might have their clinical work-assessed would lead to biased ratings of more severe symptomatology in their patients. The results of this study partially supported the hypothesis., Patients in the peer review system were rated as more dysfunctional at admission on Psychological Functioning than patients in the control groups. No differences, however, were, found on Basic Life Functioning, Anti-Social Behavior, or Mental Processes. The implications for these results relative to psychotherapy research, quality assurance, and program evaluation are discussed.

The tenacity of folk psychotherapy: A functional interpretation

SummaryIn order to clarify the continued high utilization of the folk psychotherapist in East Africa, a total of 31 Tanzanian Shaman were studied. It was found that patients with emotional problems make use of both the traditional and western practitioner and that a clear conceptual distinction is made between the services offered. Analyses were made in terms of the style of service delivery, the underlying model of causation and the range of techniques utilized. It was concluded that the pre-scientific psychotherapist is not simply a comfortable habit but represents a dynamic approach to psycho-social disorders which must be considered in conjunction with western practices in future mental health planning.

EVALUATING QUALITY ASSURANCE PROGRAMS

Publisher Summary The American public is no longer willing to support expensive and inefficient federal programs. This new emphasis on justifying the costs of products from federally financed programs has especially affected the mental health field in the form of quality assurance requirements. This chapter provides an overview on how to evaluate quality assurance programs in outpatient settings. Quality assurance programs are rapidly being developed throughout the mental health service delivery field, particularly in outpatient settings. The assessment of quality assurance programs represents a special type of evaluation that is in a more formative stage of development than are other areas of mental health program evaluation. This is because of the relatively new stage of development of the field of outpatient quality assurance. In addition, because quality assurance programs include evaluative processes, there are special considerations that need to be addressed when evaluating an essentially evaluative activity. The chapter describes quality assurance and its distinction from program evaluation.

Measuring defensiveness against future anxiety : telepression

This study attempted to create an analogue through which the concept oftelepression (or futurity defensiveness) could be measured. A total of 54 undergraduate college students participated in the study; 27 experimental subjects were exposed to a “threatening” lecture on world ecology and 27 control subjects to a “neutral” lecture. Major hypotheses were generally confirmed using the Rappaport Time Line (RTL), a spatial representation of temporal experience. Experimental subjects showed a dramatic increase in “past” emphasis and a tendency to constrict present and future time zones on specific temporal indices on the RTL. Results are interpreted as confirming that psychological defense operates in terms offuture anxiety, much as defenses work on the avoidance of the past.

Ego Identity and Temporality Psychoanalytic and Existential Perspectives

Eriksons concept of ego identity is related to the existential concept of temporality. Both concepts emphasize the integration of past, present, and future into a sense of continuity. The significance of movement into a perceived open future is underscored in terms of implications for theory and practice.

An Assessment of Staff Duplicity in Attitudes Toward the Therapeutic Milieu

HE past two decades in psychiatry have been characterised by the emergence of Tin-patient treatment ideologies which dramatically departed from the prior custodial approaches. Perhaps the most important single development was the ‘‘therapeutic community&dquo; approach strongly advocated by Jones.4 Because the entire social context of treatment came to be seen as critical to the therapeutic process, the roles of the complete spectrum of institutional staff naturally fell under scrutiny. Consequently, many studies have been reported which attempt to assess staff opinions about mental illness ortry to correlate ideologies with a variety of factors. 12 3 6 8