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Preface

I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, writing, reading, and arithmetic in order; ’tis easy, and of course you will. But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Prose and Poetry In the following pages, we aim to take Emerson’s advice. This text is a serious examination of clinical interviewing as a professional activity; it includes the “grammar, writing, reading, and arithmetic” of professional interviewing. But in the spirit of Emerson, we have also smuggled in some contraband, and we encourage you to do the same. For our part, we include occasional humor, the practical application of fantasy through skill-building activities, and stories of our own and our colleagues’ pitfalls and successes. For your part, we hope you learn clinical interviewing with all the seriousness that an enterprise dedicated to evaluating and helping people who come to you in emotional pain and distress deserves. We also hope you will smuggle a little contraband into the learning process. In particular, we hope the contraband you smuggle in is yourself.

Clinical interviewing is a practical, hands-on activity. It’s hard to imagine learning to sit with, listen to, evaluate, and provide professional help to another human being simply by reading a book. Nevertheless, that’s exactly the purpose of this book. We hope that by reading it—in combination with classroom activities, practicum or prepracticum experiences, and feedback from peers and supervisors—budding mental health professionals will learn the art and science, the intimacy and objectivity of clinical interviewing.

This, the third edition of Clinical Interviewing,marks the 10th anniversary of its original publication. This fact not only makes us 10 years older, but also, we hope, 10 years wiser. If nothing else, it means we’ve had a decade to reflect on what we originally wrote.

We’ve made numerous positive changes and updates, which include:

• A stronger multicultural emphasis, with 13 new “Individual and Cultural Highlights” sprinkled throughout the text.
• A continued emphasis on contemporary literature in psychiatry, psychology, counseling, and social work as reflected by over 100 new citations.
• New sections in Chapters 6 and 10 on the science of clinical interviewing.
• A new section in Chapter 7—Intake Interviewing and Report Writing—that includes information on writing intake reports—complete with an intake outline and sample report.
• New sections in Chapter 7 on interviewing clients with chemical dependency
problems and trauma victims (with a special emphasis on using motivational interviewing principles and strategies).
• A new section on individual and cultural considerations when conducting mental status examinations in Chapter 8.
• A completely revised section on interviewing for depression in Chapter 9.
• Inclusion of new risk factors for suicide and new suicide intervention approaches in Chapter 9.
• One fewer chapter—we have shortened and integrated Chapters 2 and 3 from the second edition so readers get to the meat and potatoes of clinical interviewing more quickly.
• New case examples throughout the book, with five new case examples in Chapter 13, the ulticultural interviewing chapter.
• Arevised and expanded instructor’s manual and test bank available online at www.wiley.com.
• A method for contacting the authors with questions, comments, or suggestions at sommersflanagan@hotmail.com.

Despite the changes, we hope this edition continues to be as learner-friendly as earlier versions. Throughout the text, we’ve tried to maintain an accessible voice; we want students to not only learn about clinical interviewing (and about themselves), but also to enjoy reading this text, and we want them to treasure the learning process. Above all, we hope this edition lives up to the comments made by Hood (2000) in his review of the second edition published in Contemporary Psychology:

Its use will depend on the instructor’s teaching philosophy, but when it is used, I expect
graduate students will consider it [Clinical Interviewing] one of their favorite texts. (p. 457)