A PCP intervention for menopause Ep.30

Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

I thought it might be useful to see how a PCP approach might be useful in exploring the menopause. I found a paper by Foster and Viney describing a group approach. They developed a model of menopause based on a personal construct account of change and informed by women’s meanings and then a brief intervention aimed at tackling the psychological impact of the menopause. Their study is a nice example of how PCP techniques can be used to facilitate reflection, loosening and tightening, resulting in improvements in the way the women felt across a number of measures of wellbeing.

References

Foster, H. & Viney, L.L. (2006) Ch. 18 in Menopause: The start of a change. Caputi, P., Foster, H. And Viney, L.L. (Eds.) (2006). Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas.

Ravenette, A.T. (1980). A drawing and its opposite: an application of the notion of the ‘construct’ in the elicitation of children’s drawings. Ch. 9 in Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View.

Linda L. Viney & Mary T. Westbrook (1976) Cognitive Anxiety: A Method of Conent Analysis for Verbal Samples, Journal of Personality Assessment, 40:2, 140-150, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4002_5

Mary T. Westbrook & Linda L. Viney (1980) Scales Measuring People's Perception of themselves as Origins and Pawns, Journal of Personality Assessment, 44:2, 167-174, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4402_7