The use of psychological formulation

Question 1

What is psychological formulation?

Answer 1

A form of diagnosis. It aims to explain the cause of a person’s difficulties by constructing an individual summary or story of a person’s life. This summary is jointly constructed by the person and their therapist.

Question 2

What are the 3 stages of psychological formulation?

Answer 2

• Offence analysis
• Understanding the function of offending (Risk analysis)
• Application to treatment

Question 3

What happens in offence analysis?

Answer 3

Is the process whereby the offense is analysed to gain insight into the offender’s motivation.

Question 4

What happens in risk analysis?

Answer 4

Scenario planning.​

A process of speculating what might happen in the future in light of information about a person’s violence history (Hart et al, 2003).​

Each scenario is a story about violence that the person might commit. It is not a prediction about what WILL happen. ​

Hypothesising about the likely or possible nature or kind of violence, the context or situations where he might be violent in the future understanding who his victims are likely to be & estimating imminence of violence and level of harm or severity.​

Scenario planning consider different scenario, such as worse case scenario where violence increases and a best case scenario where violence decreases.

Question 5

What happens in application to treatment?

Answer 5

End goal is to establish some form of intervention for the offender based on the conclusions drawn. The rehabilitation programme should reflect how the offender started, whether they have mental health issues, the risk of reoffending and how likely the offender is to stick to the programme. It should be reassessed and adapted later…… a ‘work in progress’.​

HCPC guidelines help to create some sort of standardisation.

Question 6

What are some strength to support the use of psychological formulation?

Answer 6

Help reduce recidivism for society but also improves offenders life.​

Objective if assessment based on test scores.​

Holistic view of the offender- more than a ‘diagnosis’=‘individualised’. Cultue and gender 

Using the diagram flow chart can be useful to reduce complex information into an easy-to-understand format. This can greatly help with the decision making of the consequence for individual and they danger they pose.​

Question 7

How did Whitehead et al show the case study approach to be successful using Mr C?

Answer 7

Case study approach was successful for Mr C. he developed new sense of identify developed through programme prevented further relapse.. Qualitative data gives full picture from which to draw up a formulation. Has a theoretical and practical element.

Question 8

What are some weaknesses to support the use of psychological formulation?

Answer 8

Primarily based on self report data, data gathered from clinical interviews with the offender. Data can also be collected and recorded by multiple people (McMurran and Taylor).​

Retrospective data – offenders retrospective recall may be unreliable and subject to interpretation. ​

Massively qualitative – subjectivity. ​

Risk of simplifying complex data. The use of diagrams

Question 9

What did McMurran and Taylor criticise about the use of psychological formulation?

Answer 9

Hard to assess effectiveness of case formulation as not standardised and defined differently by organisations (McMurran and Taylor). Can only assess in terms of whether offender reoffends and most reoffending goes undetected!