Standards of Assessment

Alright, let’s get started! First, let’s briefly recap some components of assessment, which we are all mostly familiar with.

We usually start our assessment process by exploring the presenting picture:

• What are we observing? Client’s appearance, behavior etc.

• What are the client’s complaints and symptoms? What are they hoping to achieve through therapy?

• Some information about their work, family and other life circumstances

• Medications

• Habits (including drug and alcohol)

• Risk factors

That’s all pretty standard stuff. But where I would like us to delve a bit deeper is client history. This is where the juiciest parts of assessment start. The main components of history which we are interested in are:

Pathogenic learning history: what aspects of client’s history may have resulted in learned thoughts, emotions or behaviors that are unhealthy and pathological?

Traumas: are there any childhood traumas? Or traumas later in life?

Any issues around early attachment, the quality of parent-child bond and other early relationships: What have these experiences translated to later in life?

Socio-cultural influences: what larger socio-cultural influences are added to the mix? These include cultural beliefs, social media trends and so on.

Maladaptive schemas beliefs about the self and others: what life events shaped core beliefs or important schemas for client?

So how do we organise and make sense of these important elements of client history? As I worked towards developing models and formulas to assist therapists with the task of organising and making sense of client histories, it became apparent to me that the best tool for the job was already available to us in the form of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs (which you are all no doubt familiar with)! Of course, to my knowledge, the Hierarchy of needs hasn’t previously been used in the form that the Fount model makes use of it. So you could say that the Fount Model draws on the Hierarchy of needs, rather than use it in its original intended form.

To begin with, let’s remind ourselves of the various components of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.