What a Mistake

For my upcoming clinical comps, we have to have transcribed an ENTIRE session word for word. Many of us, due to the time crunch, hired a transcription service to provide this service. The results are transcripts that have gross inaccuracies and that took ridiculous amounts of time. Supposedly, my 49 minute session took a profession 5 hours to transcribe..and let's just say the results were less than stellar and cost me $150. OUCH!

I wrote this email to the lady just now. I feel like a bully when I do such things, but I think I'm being fair. Healthy aggression, my supervisor calls it.

NAME,

As I have begun to review my transcript, I have to say that I am highly disappointed in the quality and accuracy. The blanks that you could not understand are less of a problem, as they are pretty easy to fill in myself, and some areas are justifiably difficult to understand for various reasons. However, there are large mistakes that alter the meaning of the of entire portions of the material. There are even phrases and entire sentences that are omitted, with no designation or line (_________) indicating that the transcriptionist could not understand the material. Most of these are extremely clear on the recording and are omitted for no apparent reason.

I have had other individuals, without viewing your transcription or my corrections to that transcription, who all were easily able to reproduce the first 2 pages of my session with much greater accuracy than the product that I received from COMPANY. It is my suspicion that you may have used a computer program (such as media player) to play the audio file. When hitting the pause/play button, these players often skip small sections of the file, and such a pattern of missed sentences seems to be apparent in my final transcription.

I by no means expected the transcription to be error free, and our contract reflected such. However, missing entire statements or sentences without designating that you couldn't understand those phrases (It seems to me that they were just missed completely) is not acceptable. Also, the apparent lack of professional transcription equipment seems to have made this process take longer than I would expect from someone who does this as a professional service.

I have spoken with at least four other students who experienced similar degrees of mistakes such as missing phrases, and even grammar, spelling, and clerical misakes. I would like to talk with you via phone or even in person to hear from you possibly compelling reasons why my transcription, (or the other students') was difficult and why the large number of inaccuracies are present. I am headed out of town and will not be available until next week, but I would like to discuss such matters on A CERTAIN DAY or later in the week.

I would like to be able to reccommend your services in the future, or even feel confident that I received my $150 worth of services from COMPANY. However, without some sort of discussion or understanding about this matter, I would have to inform my fellow students and my academic department, who may want to use your service in the future, that your services are not to the standard that I would recommend. From the combined fees of myself and my fellow students, this was likely a lucrative customer base for you. If I am mistaken, and COMPANY prefers not to do this kind of work, I wish that therapy students were informed of that before our business was accepted.

Overall, I am disappointed with the quality of the work, and would like to give you the opportunity to address that and provide me with some understanding from your point of view. I am open to however you would like to do this, via phone or in person. I truly don't prefer email for these matters and am only resorting to this due to my being out of town.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Nicole

Who am I?

Today, I was talking with some Master's program students, and we were discussing what are good reasons and what are not good reasons to apply to a doctoral program, and specifically the doctoral program at our school. They were asking me about what I was juggling, my school and practicum responsiblities, mission work, TA hours, etc.

One of the ladies turned and looked at me, and she said, "But you seem so calm, and you're sitting here taking time to talk with us, when you have so much you could be doing." Wow! I almost had to stop and ask if she was talking to me, because based on the person I have been for the first 26 years of my life, those are not reflections that I would expect. But that is me now, and I am this recently calm, almost serene person. It's amazing the work that Christ has done in my life, making me this new person whom I have to get to know all over again.

Life is crazy insane, swirling all around me, but in most moments I have a peace that I have never had before. It's amazing the faithfulness of God. Look at me! Using God talk type of language that I usually avoid. I almost hesitate to talk of these feelings and this experience because religious language and concepts have been abused by many in my past to produce trite answers and fake joy. But, I don't want to deny that this change is not my own, that's for sure.

So, what the heck. Peace be with you.

A (not so) brief paragraph on the process of healing.

The Process of Healing

Healing, in its various forms, is a complicated process. While God sometimes chooses to intervene in miraculous and seemingly immediate ways, more often God leads the human to healing through a process. The reasons for this are many and often known only to God. However, through the wisdom of scripture, tradition, and personal experience, there are methods through which we find healing often happens.

One of these paths is having another bear witness to one’s pain and suffering. Witnesses hearing testimony and confession confirm the reality of one’s story. Any individual who has long held a secret to the point that he or she doubted its truth will attest to the incomplete but remarkable relief experienced by speaking such secrets aloud to another person. Healing also often occurs in the context of relationship. From relatively high functioning individuals to the severely character disordered, we all posses a level of inherited and acquired relationship patterns that are convoluted by sin. By entering into loving and caring relationships with others (and with God) that disrupt or frustrate these patterns and provide new ways of relating, we can experience a measure of healing. Such experiences compel us toward healthier and holier interactions with one another and with the Creator.

Finally, healing is reflected in the developmental process. God, being fully aware that we are never fully aware, orchestrates our individual experiences in such a manner that we learn in a cumulative but somewhat lock-step way. Each experience has the potential to yield new insight that we previously could not grasp because of the cumulative nature of each experience before that moment. Such a developmental path to healing accounts for the temporal nature of certain dis-eases.

I'm tired...

..of being low man on the totem pole. My site is amazing, but being a student means never being in the same office. That's hard for me, a person who is highly impacted by place. I just received an email that my client and I have been rescheduled for another room. This is pretty darn annoying because my client and I have met in that room for 2 years. Talk about disrupting the frame. *Sigh* Do I speak up or just put up with it for this one week? Or point out that there's an empty room that no one is scheduled for that the clinician who is changing her schedule could use?

I sent an email, and I hope it's not taken as whining. I'm willing to move all my clients but this one, because we're in the middle of terminating what has been a 2 year therapy relationship.

What do you think?

In the state of Illinois, the extent to which therapy sessions with adolescents are confidential is at the determination of the therapist when it comes to whether or not to disclose to parents. I highly value the confidentiality of the therapy context, and believe that it's my job to work to have an adolescent tell his or her own parents important information, so that I can eventually be out of the picture and they have new skills in regard to communication with one another. But there are limits to that, and I often tell the teen, you can tell your mom/dad at the end of the session, or I will. Which do you prefer? Or, you have until our next session to tell mom or dad this or we'll be doing it in that session.

Here's a list we're supposed to rank for my Advanced Ethics course. What do you think? Tell me your ratings and then I'll show you mine after some people have responded.

Would you require disclosure to parents (or anyone else) for any of the following behaviors on the part of your 16 year teen client even if the teen doesn’t want you to disclose? Give your rating on the following scale for each of the following:

Rank the 0-10 with 0 being Would Not Disclose, 5 Totally Depends, 10 Definitely disclose.

_____ Being sexually active?
_____ Being sexually active without the use of protection?
_____ Being sexually promiscuous?
_____ Doing marijuana once per week on the weekend?
_____ Smoking pot daily before school?
_____ Doing ecstasy once per month?
_____ Driving into a dangerous neighborhood to buy heroin for the teen’s personal use?
_____ Dealing / selling drugs?
_____ Vandalism (graffiti)
_____ Petty retail theft
_____ Buying a fake i.d. to use in bars
_____ Selling fake ids to others
_____ Your client tells you that she is having sex with an 18 year old girl
_____ Your client tells you that she is having sex with a 35 year old
_____ Stealing bikes from kids in the neighborhood and re-selling them elsewhere
_____ Your client was in a group fight with kids from a rival high school and thinks that he may have broken the nose and arm of another kid and possibly fractured the other kid’s skull as well
_____ Your client stole a car
_____ Your client plans to be involved in a large scale fight between rival groups this weekend
_____ Your client plans to have a party at her home this weekend when her parents are away
_____ Your client is pregnant and her parents don’t know
_____ And she is thinking about having an abortion