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Beyond The Diagnosis – Part 2

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In this four-part series, I aim to explore a need-based approach for offering care to students experiencing mood or personality challenges while they are on the waiting list. 

Working in school counseling brings unique joys and challenges. One challenge we have explored throughout this four-part series is assisting undiagnosed students facing mood and personality difficulties. As school counsellors, we recognize the importance of providing adequate support and care for students on waitlists for services such as psychological assessment. In our last article, we looked at a call to move beyond the diagnosis and work towards a need-based approach to offering counselling care and support to our students while they are on a waitlist for psychological assessment. 

In the second part of our series, our goal is to describe mood and personality-related challenges and how we can respond to students facing these types of challenges.

We will first briefly describe what I mean when I use the language of mood challenges or personality challenges, and what these understandings imply for supporting students in school. Then we will briefly return to the BEDS acronym I shared in our first article and go a bit more in-depth on how this acronym helps me remember significant ways to support students facing mood and personality challenges while they are on the waitlist for psychological assessment and other services.

Mood challenges

When considering students experiencing mood-related challenges, terms such as depression, bipolar, and mania may be among the first we think of. Yet, looking at student needs and a need-based approach, I like to use a broader understanding of the term mood provided by Samuel Gladding, who describes mood as “an emotional state of mind. The pervasive way a person feels most of the time.”1 In using this slightly broader definition, we can reflect on those students in our schools who stay stuck in one emotion. When these students stay stuck, they can begin to experience things like stress or a lack of motivation to persevere with school. Not to mention all the other challenges they may be facing in learning how to manage their emotional states or ruts. This means that a good first step in identifying students with mood-related challenges is trying to see where they feel stuck, what emotional or mindset rut they are fixed in, and working collaboratively with them to navigate or strategize through that rut. 

Personality challenges

Personality-related challenges are also a term that merits defining. Similar to mood challenges, the term “personality” is often associated with personality disorders, which is understandable. As school counselors, we are trained to observe symptoms to assist in the assessment process when students are referred to psychological services. However, since counselors typically cannot diagnose students and must work with teams of teachers and other specialists who also cannot diagnose, using the term “personality challenges” can be more inclusive and effective in addressing individual student needs within the school setting. This again means that by personality we’re referring to a more general definition, such as proposed by Gladding, “A global concept that includes all of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of someone that make that person unique.” With this broader understanding of personality, I prefer to examine personality-related challenges from a developmental perspective and identity formation lens. For instance, when considering a student experiencing difficulties with emotional regulation or forming stable friendships at school, their needs and support can be assessed through the perspective of their identity formation. This means that personality challenges can be anything that impacts a student’s ability to have a clear sense of self, of meaning, or of purpose in their life. Thus, I can focus on providing students the information, strategies, and skills needed for them to have a more stable sense of self, of personality, of their identity. We see this movement towards supporting identity formation in recent counseling texts, such as one written recently by Sandra Smith-Adcock and Catherine Tucker, who, in their discussion of adolescence, emphasize the importance of identity formation and its relationship with well-being.2 Moreover, Smith-Adcock and Tucker discuss the importance of counselors in community and school settings to provide care that aids and supports students in developing who they are, especially when they’re facing challenges related to their personality and personality development.3 what this means for us as school counselors is that our students experiencing personality challenges can benefit from counseling interventions catered to help them discover their sense of who they are and their identity formation-related needs. 

What next?

Now that we have identified and cleared up a bit what we mean by mood and personality-related challenges, we must begin talking about what we do next. As school counselors, we need practical stuff. Now that we have talked about how to identify mood and personality challenges in the general sense, we need to talk about what we can practically do to support students facing those challenges. In the first part of this article, I mentioned an acronym that I used to help me work with students presenting personality and mood-related challenges. As I shared before, this acronym is by no means scientific, but if my simple ways I use to try and support students using evidence-based research are helpful for me, I find it valuable to share them in case they benefit others, and that is why I share them with you now. The acronym is BEDS:

  • Boundaries: I found that students facing personality and mood challenges sometimes need information, psychoeducation, and skills training with boundaries– both in placing healthy limits in relationships, but also healthy relationships with themselves. When students feel confused or lost in their relationships, they sometimes seek strategies to clarify these relationships, communicate effectively, and understand when and how to say no. This is a type of support we can provide through counselling interventions.
  • Emotional Regulation: I also notice that students facing mood and personality challenges sometimes need help understanding the purpose of emotions and developing emotional regulation strategies as well as validation around which emotions are natural to experience and when. In the language of Matthew McKay, some students need support learning how to surf the waves of strong emotions instead of trying to fight or avoid them.4
  • Decision Making: Based on my experience, students frequently benefit from decision-making support. This can include instruction on decision-making skills or counselling to assist them in navigating and reflecting on their choices. Since part of personality and identity development is growing through decisions, students challenged with making decisions through stress, pressures, strong emotions, or feeling stuck, can benefit from our interventions. 
  • Safe and Compassionate Space: In my experience as a counsellor in academic training, every student facing mood or personality challenges has needed a place where they are heard, listened to, understood, and not judged or labeled. School counselling is not always about what we are able to do or achieve with our students, but what and who we can be for our students – a safe and compassionate person. 

Conclusion

As I have said before in the first part of this series, I believe that as school counsellors, we work in a distinct clinical space when we choose to work in a school setting. In this second article in our four-part series on working with students while on the waiting list, we briefly described mood and personality-related challenges so that we can support students’ needs for boundaries, emotional regulation, decision-making skills, and a safe and compassionate space. In the end, as school counsellors, we aim to support student development and identity formation by responding to their needs. In our forthcoming article, we will examine several targeted interventions that I employ and deem beneficial when working with students experiencing mood and personality challenges. Until then, I trust that our discussion on supporting students through a need-based approach proves as valuable in your practice as it does in mine. 


THE AUTHOR:
Justin Bertrand, M.Div. is a counsellor in academic training at the high school level as well as a part time student in the MA in counselling & spiritual care program with McMaster Divinity College. He has over ten years of experience in various counselling settings and is passionate about offering adolescents compassionate and professional care.


Bibliography
Gladding, Samuel T. 2018. The Counseling Dictionary. 4th ed. Alexandria: Amarican Counseling Association.
McKay, Matthew, Patrick Fanning, and Patricia Zurita Ona. 2011. Mind and Emotions: A Universal Treatment for Emotional Disorders. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Smith-adcock, Sondra, and Catherine Tucker. 2023. Counseling Children And Adolescents; Connecting Theory, Development, and Diversity. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc.


1 (Gladding 2018, 100)
2 (Smith-adcock and Tucker 2023)
3 (Smith-adcock and Tucker 2023)
4 (McKay, Fanning and Ona 2011)