How Can You Tailor Psychoeducation to Patient Understanding?
Psychologist Brief
How Can You Tailor Psychoeducation to Patient Understanding?
Delving into the intricacies of psychoeducation, we've gathered insights from thirteen mental health professionals, including therapists and clinical psychologists, on personalizing patient care. From using real-world analogies to considering a patient's history with external expertise, these experts share diverse strategies for making psychoeducation resonate with individuals' unique needs and levels of understanding.
- Use Real-World Analogies
- Conduct Thorough Intake Assessments
- Make Learning Playful for Kids
- Assess and Simplify Language
- Employ Customized Metaphors
- Employ Teach-Back Learning Checks
- Allow Your Humanity to Show Through
- Incorporate Client Interests and Feedback
- Assess Baseline Understanding First
- Build Strong Therapeutic Alliances
- Adapt Analogies to Age Groups
- Take Time to Understand the Patient
- Consider History with External Expertise
Use Real-World Analogies
Providing analogies or examples from real-world experience can take a complex concept and make it easy to understand. Using analogies that align with the client's hobbies or passions makes it even easier. It can be as simple as discussing the behavior of a character from their favorite show and connecting how that character's behavior or personality describes how the brain works.
Conduct Thorough Intake Assessments
Tailoring psychoeducation to best resonate with a patient begins with a high-quality intake assessment. From your first conversation, take note of biographical factors, such as education or history of an IEP, as well as their learning style and attention span. On an ongoing basis, read your patient's non-verbal cues to gauge whether they appear to be understanding what you are saying. Provide ample opportunities for them to ask questions, and occasionally prompt them to summarize their understanding of what you have explained. Use language that aligns with how they speak, and go the extra mile to incorporate outside tools like infographics and video clips.
Make Learning Playful for Kids
As a child therapist, I am very intentional about delivering psychoeducation in a way that both kids and parents can easily understand. A brain that feels safe is a brain that is ready to learn, so I focus on making teaching opportunities playful and interactive. Instead of using clinical terms, I use simple language and stories to convey concepts. I also employ images and playful graphics to create metaphors, making it easier for children and their parents to grasp and relate to the ideas I want to teach.
Assess and Simplify Language
One way I tailor psychoeducation to each patient is by assessing the client's existing knowledge about their mental health condition or the therapeutic process. This can be done through open-ended questions, questionnaires, or informal conversations. I also use easily understandable language. I avoid using jargon or technical terms that the client might not understand. I explain concepts in simple, relatable language. For instance, instead of saying 'cognitive restructuring,' I might say 'changing how you think about things.'
Employ Customized Metaphors
Metaphor can be a powerful, custom-built way to communicate important principles or ideas to clients. Psychoeducation can sometimes feel boring, lecture-like, and irrelevant to a client who is in a painful place and wanting help. Over the years, I have collected a list of go-to analogies that I find resonate with most people. I also like to customize comparisons to fit my clients' interests, professions, and lived experiences. Some of my favorites come from my own everyday experiences.
Employ Teach-Back Learning Checks
I listen to how they describe their experiences to understand what kind of learner they are: visual, verbal, interactive? Do they use metaphors to describe feelings, or are the words out of reach? This is helpful in giving me the information I need to meet them where they are. I am also a fan of the teach-back method, which helps me check in on a client's interpretation, understanding, and what I need to do to further tailor psychoeducation.
Allow Your Humanity to Show Through
Simplify your message to the bare essentials. Regardless of who I am working with, whether they are a five-year-old or a Harvard graduate, I am attempting to distill my message into the most effective message possible. To educate is to allow someone to learn complex material in the easiest way possible.
To further tailor your education, allow your humanity to show through. Each individual will have a unique way of communicating—embrace that. Allow the educational process to be a collaborative effort between the two of you. If they have life experience that allows them to understand things more easily due to being able to meld it with different lived experiences—use them! Let them assimilate their own world into your teachings.
Incorporate Client Interests and Feedback
I love using relatable examples and metaphors that align with my clients' interests. If they love sports, I might compare coping strategies to training drills that build mental muscles. Or if they're into TV shows, I'll relate concepts to their favorite characters and storylines. I also try to figure out how they learn best—whether they are more into visuals, hands-on activities, or just talking things through—and adjust my approach however needed. I find it important to regularly check in for understanding and encourage my clients to ask questions. This way, learning feels more like a conversation and less like a lecture!
Assess Baseline Understanding First
When you're explaining psychological concepts, it's so important to get a sense of your audience's baseline understanding before you dive in. You don't want to hit someone with a ton of jargon that's going to alienate and confuse them, but you also don't want to use overly simple language that might make someone feel talked down to if they've already heard of what you're talking about.
The simplest way to thread this needle is to just start by asking what the person you're talking to already knows about the topic in question. For example, I'll gauge someone's starting knowledge about fear and the nervous system with a question like, "Are you familiar with the concept of 'fight-or-flight' or 'freeze'?" And my explanation of the body's response to perceived threats is going to be very different based on whether they say "Nope!" or "I've heard of fight-or-flight, but not freeze," or "Yeah, I've learned a little bit about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems."
Even though you may be doing most of the talking when you're providing psychoeducation, you still want the person you're speaking with to feel heard and respected—not like they're strapped in for a long lecture with no escape. Starting off with a simple question to assess their knowledge both builds trust and helps you provide the information that's going to be the most targeted and useful.
Build Strong Therapeutic Alliances
For mental health professionals, conducting a comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment is crucial. This assessment allows the use of acquired knowledge to tailor psychoeducation to an individual's cultural comprehension or educational level. Moreover, I firmly believe in the significant role of the therapeutic alliance. Building a strong rapport with a patient fosters a sense of comfort and trust, encouraging them to seek clarification until they achieve understanding.
Adapt Analogies to Age Groups
I work with a wide range of ages, and psychoeducation can look very different for everyone. The most powerful way to adapt is by using analogies that the person can understand. For example, a kid can understand a fire alarm for anxiety, but would not be able to understand an in-depth discussion on the internal workings of different parts of the brain.
Take Time to Understand the Patient
The best way to tailor psychoeducation to ensure the patient's understanding is to understand the patient yourself. By taking the time to determine the developmental level, education, and general cognitive abilities of the patients, the psychoeducation provided can meet the patients where they are.
Consider History with External Expertise
One way to tailor psychoeducation is to refrain from making an offering before you have a working understanding of that person's relationship to receiving offerings. Someone's history of feeling overly controlled or depending on external expertise instead of a sense of self should inform the choice to provide psychoeducation at all.