Humanistic Wellness Services for Community Mental Health Providers

The author examines the unique ability of mental health providers to offer humanistic services in a highly competitive atmosphere by using a wellness approach. J. E. Myers and T. J. Sweeney's (2005) 5 second-order factors are offered as a conceptual model. Therapeutic techniques and humanizing benefits for individuals, families, and communities are provided. ********** A young woman recently asked if she could discuss with me her experiences at a local mental health clinic. She was not displeased with the work of her counselors or the provider organization and thought that she had made some progress, but she still felt as though something was missing from her therapy. The following is a summary of what she presented. The woman described her therapeutic work as dealing with depression and understood that her depression stemmed from a traumatic experience during early childhood. Counseling gave her a reasonable understanding of the problem, medications, side effects, and anticipated outcomes of drug treatment. She clearly explained the exercises she had been given to do at home and stated that the counselor was using cognitive-behavior therapy to guide her treatment. She recognized the progress she had made through her counseling sessions, to a certain extent, yet something still seemed missing. It was becoming clear that she saw herself in terms of problematic parts, not a health-seeking whole. She understood her deficits but could not identify her strengths and how to use them. The counselor was providing quality treatment that adhered to appropriate standards of care, yet this interaction highlighted a common missing component in treatment by mental health providers. The missing component was a humanistic wellness perspective that emphasized wellness and the whole person by integrating body, mind, and spirit to optimize human behavior and functioning (Myers, Sweeney, & Witmer, 2001). This client is like many others in counseling who are working to improve problems by eliminating deficits. Professionals can miss the diversity of strengths and vehicles for support that provide clients with opportunities to make positive change. People attend to strengths when they are feeling their best, but these strengths tend to be ignored by clients, and often by counselors, during difficult times. Many would attribute the lack of a professional holistic focus to the emphasis that managed care places on pathology, which leads to a medical model of treatment that focuses instead on drugs and remediation (Carney & Hazler, 2005). Several researchers proposed that successful treatment outcomes are limited by the ineffectiveness of the medical model in dealing with multiple risk factors and each person's unique environmental context (Cowen, 2000a; Durlak & Wells, 1997). The medical model's focus on deficits and fixing the problem has value, but it is not sufficient to promote the full functioning of individuals. A more holistic humanistic model is needed for that purpose. The counseling profession has long advocated theoretical models of wellness, which go beyond the medical sense of health as being a lack of illness (Sweeney, 2001). These models that are designed to explain the wellness concept emphasize maximizing human potential for a full and vibrant life (Dunn, 1977) and commonly focus on the connections between multiple human functions and the environments. Elements such as mind, body, and spirit (Adams, Bezner, & Steinhardt, 1977; Crose, Nicholas, Gobble, & Frank, 1992) are viewed as being intimately connected to life involvement activities such as work, recreation, and friendships (Witmer, & Sweeney, 1992). The humanistic view of wellness levels connects individuals' overall levels of life satisfaction (Hermon & Hazler, 1999) to issues such as anxiety and depression (Harari, Waehler, & Rogers, 2005). Those who provide mental health services should focus more attention on the words community and health, which represent the essence of humanistic wellness alternatives (Cowen, 2000b). …