An intervention in a Mental Health Centre.

Abstract

We will present the report of an intervention carried out for a Mental Health Centre (CSM), in an Italian town of more than one million inhabitants. Some comments on the development of the Mental Health Services in Italy, in the last thirty years, will precede the report of the case. The same clinical psychology categories used in analyses of organizational relationships, adopted to outline this process, will be later used to present the report on the intervention in the CSM. These introductory remarks on the Mental Health Services development will be useful for those who are unfamiliar with the specific Italian situation. In more general terms, however, we think it is always useful to sum up the characteristics of the context in which the psychologist intervenes. In fact, we adopt an approach to the intervention that involves a profound knowledge of the context where the intervention is realized by bringing together methodology and context, in a close connection. 
We will explain what a report is, in our view, and why the intervention in the CSM is an intervention of clinical psychology. In our opinion, every intervention that uses as its tool the relationship between the psychologist and his client, is a clinical psychology intervention. As for the report, for the clinical psychologist, reporting constantly about what happens during his work is the best way to manage and assess the intervention itself. 
The report, useful both to the work-staff and to the client, is written starting from the reading of a client's demand, and proceeding towards the project, its realization and appraisal. We will put forward here, with the report of the intervention in the CSM in a context of scientific debate, the last draft of the report we used to carry out the intervention and its evaluation. It will be possible to see that while the relationship between the psychologist and his client is being reported, it is also being constructed, with the use of clinical psychology categories. 
As it is a report written after the conclusion of the intervention, today we will use it above all in its role of appraisal.