This is what I tell students:
An activity can be purposeful without being meaningful, and vice versa. Occupational contexts, cultural and spritual values and state of health all influence whether an activity is indeed one or the other or both. Example: I love to do housework ( I know I am in the minority on this one!) I derive a great amount of pleasure and satisfaction in the process of cleaning and in the final outcome of my efforts, i.e sitting in my living room reading and enjoying the aroma of Murphy's oil soap and the gleam of the sun bouncing on my non dusty furniture. So in the context of my home, I find housework to be both meaningful and purposerful. This is a reflection of the values I bring (I was rasied in a very clean home where my mother took a great deal of pride in keeping a beautiful house, and I was raised to value cleanliness and no clutter). However, if I am sick, housework becomes more purposeful than meaningful. I do it because I do not want to let things slide too far. Also, in other contexts, I do not find meaning in housework..if I have to enages in a cleaning task at work, it is merely a purposeful activity, something I need to get done for a variety of reasons, but is not very meaningful for me. I am not working as a maid in a hotel for this reason, nor am I compulsivley cleaning my office or my relative's homes. I think an issue has arisen out of our neglect as a profession to really differentiate between the concept of an activity being purposeful versus meaningful, and also how we interject the word function into the mix as well. It is the reason why I think I burnt out in rehab OT. Trying to practice the best OT I could, I would bend over backwards trying to find out what my patients liked, then setting up scenarios to try to accommodate these preferences so therapy could be purposeful meaningful and functional. Sometimes it was tremendously successful, but many times it was no more motivating to the client than having them stack cones. I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong with the people whom it didn't work like a charm for. It almost seemd at times that my colleagues who were having their clients do theraband exercises or stack cones would have better compiance and participation in therapy than my clients did. Once I began using the COPM and studying occupation, my appreciation for the invisable influences on occupational performance guided my interventions, and I found myself with happier clients. The COPM as a tool let me help ferret out with my clients what would be meaningful versus purposeful for them. Sometimes we engaged in therapy that swung more to the purposeful side of the spectrum, as in when I had people who could readily realize that the only way they could go home was to be able to perfrom some purposeful activites, albeit not necessarily meaningful for them. Othertimes I was able to capitalize on activites that were both meaningful and purposeful, as in the time I had a gentleman who every year cooked a very traditional ethnic dinner for his wife on their aniversary, and he happened to be in rehab for a CVA when his aniversary was coming up. We spent the whole week in therapy planning, preparing and cooking the dinner, which we arranged for he and his wife to have by themselves in our OT kitchen, complete with romantic music and mood lighting. It was without a doubt one of the MOST satisfying experiences as a therapist that I have EVER had. His motor, communication, mobility and cognitive skills all improved and boy did he sing the praise of OT! His wife told me later that he was so depressed when he had the stroke, he told her he wanted to die. She said "I don't know what what went on during therapy but every day he came back a littlel brighter and a little more motivated". To sum it up, I think we all (myself included) have been a bit lax in how we use words like functional, purposeful and meaningful when we describe activity. I have been guilty of selecting "purposeful" activites that really onlly served my purposes, not my clients. I have maybe even in my younger days minimized the value of meaningful activities to the client becasue I couldn't readily see their purpose. The Canadian Occupational Perfromance Measure really is a nice way to start getting to the heart of what people want (the meaningful part?)and need (the purposeful part?)to be able to do. I am interested in hearing others comments on this post initiated by Ron. *********��*********** Unsubscribe? Send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message's *body*, put the following text: unsubscribe OTlist ** List messages are archived at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] *********��***********
