Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

Melanie works at a local community mental health agency. She is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor who supervises doctoral interns from the local university. She also runs many programs and groups within the agency. Candace began working as a doctoral intern at the community mental health agency 2 months ago. Melanie is her supervisor.
Incident
Melanie and Candace have been seeing many clients individuals who have presented with body image concerns, so they decided that it would be beneficial to run a group on body image. The preplanned the group and designed it to explore women’s concerns with their body image, shape, size, and weight as well as to explore where negative feelings about their body image arose (i.e., family, media, peers). Melanie and Candace also designed the group so that the group members could learn skills and techniques to combat members’ negative feelings about their bodies. The group leaders decided to announce the group to their current clients as well as advertise for the group in the local newspaper. The leaders decided that the group would have a maximum of 10 group members and run for 12 weeks. Both Melanie and Candace understood that many other serious concerns could be related to body image concerns (i.e., eating disorders); therefore, they decided to screen all individuals who inquired about the group in order to made sure that (1) the group was appropriate for the individual and (2) the individuals were not currently under the care of another counselor or physician. They received 28 inquiries from people who were interested in participating in the group. Due to time constraints, Melanie and Candace decided to each take half of the individuals who inquired about the body image group and prescreen them. After prescreening all 28 members, they consulted with each other on the possible group members, only discussing presenting concerns but not discussing demographics. They came to a final conclusion on 10 individuals for the group, with 3 of the group members being individual clients of Melanie, and 1 group member seeing Candace in individual sessions. The following week Melanie and Candace had their first body image group. When she walked into the group, Candace realized that one of the group members was a master’s degree student from her university. The master’s degree student had been in a couple of her counseling classes over the previous year.
Discussion
After the first group session ended, Candace revealed to Melanie that she knew one of the group members form her counseling programs at the university. Both Melanie and Candace realized that the master’s degree student had not talked much during the group session and had glanced hesitantly at Candace a couple of times throughout the group. They also realized that three of the group members who were being seen individually by Melanie seemed to dominate the group, taking up the majority of the group time with their body concerns. These three group members also seemed to be way ahead of the other group members in awareness of their body image concerns, while the other group members appeared to shy away from more intimate issues this early in the group. The one group member that Candace saw individually did not seem comfortable in the group and spoke only to Candace when she shared in the group and not to the other group members.
Questions

1. What important pieces of the prescreening process did the two group leaders overlook?
2. What are the implications of having members in the group that are currently being seen in individual counseling sessions by one of the group leaders?
3. Are there any concerns about the relationship between the doctoral intern and the master’s student?
4. What are the next steps that should be taken by Melanie, the supervisor, or Candace, the doctoral intern, before the second body image group takes place?
5. What other ethical issues are important regarding dual relationships in group therapy.