EXPLORING THE CONDITIONS OF PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC WORK WITH INTELLECTUALLY IMPAIRED CLIENTS.

Based on our previous studies of foreign literature dealing with person centered psychotherapy (PCP) in specific groups of clients and based on our own experience from working with clients with intellectual impairment, we were interested in the conditions of providing psychotherapy to clients with intellectual impairment within the person centered approach (PCA). The paradigms forming the system of care for intellectually impaired adults in the Czech Republic have brought us to several questions. The question of differences in the concept, process and the therapist - client relationship in psychotherapy for clients with intellectual impairment has become the most important one for our research. Thus, the main goal of our research was the effort to find out and describe in what way and in what areas the presence of an intellectually impaired client impacts the psychotherapeutic session, in particular within the PCA context. Over two years, we have been gathering and evaluating data relating to the basic conditions of therapeutic sessions with a group of intellectually impaired persons. In order to unify the variables affecting the respondent sample as well as the process of examining and the research itself, we have chosen the following conditions. The group of clients and respondents at the same time was composed of 10 adults with intellectual impairment of light to medium degree. All of the clients were living in families and using the day care services. In order to simplify the organization of therapeutic sessions, we chose one particular day care. The control sample included data from sessions with two intellectually impaired clients attending individual form of psychotherapy. The data collected contained information of organizational, process and content nature, if concerning the specification of processes going on in the group or between the therapist and client in individual therapy. A part of the data processed also contained the records of reflexions and self-reflections of the therapist and records of supervisions provided to the on-going therapeutic sessions. The data gathered were processed gradually using the method of grounded theory. Considering the size of samples of the respondents and the character of data obtained, the qualitative methodology appeared to be the most appropriate choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]