ETHICS-MUST BE IN APA 7th Edition Counseling Peer Reviewed Journals and must have DOI for referenc to article
We have been talking about confidentiality for two weeks now and we did mention mandated reporting of child abuse, which is the legal standard of all 50 states and US territories. We briefly touched on mandated reporting of abuse of vulnerable adults. Vulnerable adults include those with certain intellectual disabilities, certain physical disabilities which would make a person be totally dependent on others, and elder abuse. The understanding of elder abuse tends to be the most difficult to assess. A person’s age does not necessarily make them vulnerable, but there are many vulnerable elders that are being abused in different ways and the numbers are on the rise (perhaps due to so many people becoming elders).
Counseling Today (ARTICLE IS UPLOADED UNDER ELDER ABUSE) recently had an article discussing some of the issues associated with elder abuse and I have posted the article in BB under Course Documents: Readings. You may use this as your starting point, but I would like you to do some research and answer the following questions in your initial post:
1. Define three different forms of abuse against elders.
2. In the state of New Jersey, who would you report elder abuse to,
3. What criteria would you use to decide if abuse of an elder is taking place.
Your initial post must be a minimum of 300 words and you should have a minumum of three scholarly resources (while you can and probably should cite the Counseling Today article, that does not count as one of your scholarly resources or your textbook).
Remember, minimums are just that, minimums. If you do not post the minimum weekly requirements, you will earn a 0 for the discussion. In addition, if you fail to meet the minimum word count for a post, you will receive a 0 for that post. No exceptions will be made.
Taken from Chapter 5 of our textbook which is Welfel, E.R. (2015). Ethics in counseling and psychotherapy (6th ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Elder Abuse Reporting All states also have statutes related to elder abuse, and 45 of them mandate that mental health professionals report neglect or abuse of dependent elders by those responsible for their care (Daly, Jogerst, Brinig, & Dawson, 2003; Welfel, Danzinger, & Santoro, 2000). In states that have such statutes, mental health professionals are mandated to report elder abuse or neglect to human service agencies if clients or family members disclose this information in session. As with child protection, state legislatures have reasoned that the duty to protect a dependent elder from harm is stronger than the professional’s obligation to confidentiality. Thirty-eight states impose penalties on mandated reporters who fail to report. Because the wording of these statutes varies substantially by state, counselors need to be familiar with the law in states where they practice. For instance, even the definition of elder abuse can vary substantially by jurisdiction (Scheiderer, 2011). See Daly et al. (2004) for a state-by-state analysis of legal requirements, and Zeranski and Halgin (2011) for a thoughtful discussion of the application of the reporting laws to three complex cases.)