Michael Moyer

Exploring an Online Self-Injury Support Group: Perspectives from Group Members.

In this qualitative study, the authors explored an online support group for individuals who self-injure. Twenty members of a private and moderated online group responded to questions about their history of self-injury and experiences with the online self-injury support group. Themes emerged related to the relational and emotional aspects of self-injury, the therapeutic connections in the group, experiences with no triggering norms, and strategies for asynchronous group interaction. The authors provide recommendations for counselors and group leaders.

Working with Self-Injurious Adolescents Using the Safe Kit

ABSTRACT This article offers a guide for using the Safe Kit when working with clients who self-injure. The Safe Kit can be used as a supplement to more traditional approaches to counseling and offers clients alternatives to self-injury when they need alternatives the most. The Safe Kit works under the assumption that individuals differ in the meaning they assign to self-injury and that they also differ in what they find to be effective alternatives to self-injury. The author offers basic guidelines for building and implementing the kit.

Adolescent Risk-Taking Behaviors: When Do Student Counselors Break Confidentiality?

Confidentiality is integral to counseling relationships, particularly for adolescent clients. The presence of “serious and foreseeable harm” (American Counseling Association [ACA], 2014, p. 5) may require a counselor to breach confidentiality to protect client well-being. However, counselors disagree about the ethicality of a number of professional behaviors, including definitions of risk. Such ethical divergences are even more pronounced for student counselors and when ethical concerns are value laden. A sample of 208 student counselors responded to a brief demographic questionnaire and 16-item ethics survey about an adolescent client engaging in various risking-taking behaviors. Results indicated student counselors were more likely to endorse notifying a parent/guardian as the frequency, intensity, and duration of behaviors increased or if the behavior involved self-harm. Student counselor age was the only participant/training program variable significantly correlated with ethical ratings. Implications for enhanced student counselor training for ethical work with adolescent clients engaged in risk-taking behaviors are discussed.

Reliability of scores on the manifestation of symptomatology scale: A study with adolescent students in an alternative school setting

The Manifestation of Symptomatology Scale (MOSS) is a norm-referenced, self-report instrument designed to assess characteristics of psychopathology among children and adolescents from 11 to 18 years of age. Although the MOSS has been used in several research studies within juvenile justice or disciplinary education contexts, the psychometric properties have not been examined beyond preliminary information provided in the test manual. The current research uses the scores of 172 adolescents attending a juvenile justice alternative education program to assess internal consistency of scores. Alpha coefficients were generally consistent with those reported in the MOSS manual although several differences reached statistical significance, and significant gender and ethnicity differences in alpha coefficients were observed for the Sexual Abuse scale. Low item–total correlations also were observed for many scales. Implications related to internal consistency and use of the MOSS with different groups are discussed.