Case Study Analysis: Ana Feels Hopeless counseling guide
A 750-1,000 word case study analysis of Ana, choosing Person-Centered, Existential or Gestalt theory and answering nine prompts under separate headings. This guide covers the eight authorised sessions the theory choice has to survive, why the cultural prompt cannot be answered from her nationality, and the risk her intake note has already named.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 6, 2026
What the nine prompts are actually testing
The instruction looks like a preference: pick one of three theories and defend it. What the nine prompts actually test is whether the defence survives contact with the intake note, because Ana's file supplies four facts that constrain the choice — and three of them sit where students do not look for them.
Prompt four asks whether the theory is designed for short- or long-term counselling. It is easy to answer that from a textbook and move on. But the behavioural observations end with a sentence that changes the question: Ana appeared willing to commit to eight sessions of treatment authorized by her insurance company. All three candidates are open-ended by design. Person-centred therapy sets no termination criterion beyond the client's own movement, existential work on meaning and isolation is classically unhurried, and Gestalt's present-centred, experiment-driven method is the most naturally compressible of the three without ever having been built for a session cap. So prompt four is not a recall question. It is the point at which the chosen theory either fits this case or has to be adapted in front of the reader, and answering it in the abstract forfeits marks the paper had already earned.
Prompt seven asks how the theory addresses the client's social and cultural needs, and the reflex is to reach for family as a Latin American cultural value. The intake note says the opposite. Ana is from a wealthy family in Guatemala, does not want to ask for help, and has not seen them for a year. Reading her cultural needs off her nationality contradicts the case file in front of you. What the note does support is different and more useful: she is a first-generation immigrant, fluent in Spanish, in her first episode of counselling of any kind, and every stressor she names is material — the furlough, the feared homelessness, solo parenting, a spouse eight months from return. The question worth answering is whether a non-directive approach reads to a first-time client in a concrete crisis as respect, or as the counsellor withholding help.
Prompt nine asks for a risk in using the approach, and the intake note has already supplied one. Ten pounds lost in two months, sleep she cannot get, flat affect and halting speech are vegetative signs, and nothing in the file records that suicide risk was assessed or that a medical evaluation was considered. None of the three theories on the list is diagnosis-led or symptom-targeted, and none of them contains a screening step; that is a property of humanistic practice, not an oversight in the case. So the risk to name is specific and defensible — that eight sessions of process-focused work could close without the medical and safety questions ever being asked. A paper that names that gap and says what it would do about it inside the humanistic frame has answered prompt nine. A paper that says the client may take time to open up has filled the heading.
Prompt two is the only one that requires an argument against something, and it is routinely answered as though it were prompt one again. Saying why the chosen theory suits Ana is not saying why it beat the other two. The comparison has to be concrete: what would person-centred work leave unfinished that a Gestalt experiment would reach, or what would existential work on isolation and responsibility surface that neither of the others would go looking for. Then there is the arithmetic nobody does first. Nine prompts, each under its own heading, inside 750 to 1,000 words is roughly 85 to 110 words per heading. That budget is the reason to plan the paper before writing it, because the alternative is 400 words on the first prompt and a single sentence on the ninth, then cutting the analysis rather than the throat-clearing.
Prompts one, three, five and six all want theory vocabulary attached to Ana rather than defined in the air. Person-centred work supplies congruence, unconditional positive regard, accurate empathy and the actualising tendency, with the counsellor non-directive and the client leading. Gestalt supplies contact, awareness, unfinished business, figure and ground, and an active counsellor proposing experiments in the present. Existential work supplies freedom and responsibility, isolation, meaning and existential anxiety, with the counsellor as a fellow traveller rather than a technician. In every case the move that earns the mark is the same: name the concept, then attach it to a line from the file. Unconditional positive regard means little on its own and means something precise when it is aimed at a client who will not ask her own family for help. The same test applies to the goals in prompt three: a goal written in the theory's vocabulary and aimed at something Ana said is worth more than three goals that would fit any depressed client.
Theory | Designed time horizon | What it reaches in Ana's file | Where eight sessions strain it |
|---|---|---|---|
Person-Centered | Open-ended; ends when the client's own movement says so | The shame under 'does not want to ask for help'; first-ever counselling | Non-directive pacing has no mechanism to prioritise inside a fixed cap |
Existential | Classically unhurried; meaning work is slow | Isolation with a deployed spouse; responsibility after a furlough she did not choose | Meaning questions opened late may be left open at termination |
Gestalt | Present-centred; the most compressible of the three | Halting speech, little eye contact, the here-and-now of the intake itself | Experiments can feel abrupt to a client with no prior counselling experience |
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Select a counselling theory on the evidence in a case file rather than on preference.
- 02Match a theory's designed time horizon against the treatment authorisation a case specifies.
- 03Distinguish a client's documented cultural circumstances from assumptions about their nationality.
- 04State the counsellor's and the client's roles in the terms the chosen theory actually uses.
- 05Name a limitation of an approach that is specific to it rather than true of counselling generally.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
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What the Case Study Analysis asks you to produce
- 01A 750 to 1,000 word analysis, excluding the title and reference pages.
- 02One theory chosen from Person-Centered, Existential or Gestalt.
- 03Answers to all nine assignment prompts, each under a separate heading.
- 04At least three scholarly references.
- 05APA headings and seriation as set out in the referenced style resource.
Building the analysis around Ana's eight sessions
Read the file for constraints before choosing
List the facts that limit the choice: eight authorised sessions, first-ever counselling, vegetative symptoms, no prior risk assessment, material stressors.
Prompt 1 — the concepts that make the theory fit
Name two or three concepts from the chosen theory and attach each to a specific line in Ana's intake.
Prompt 2 — the argument against the other two
Say what each rejected theory would have done with this client and why that is the weaker fit.
Prompts 3 and 4 — goals, interventions, and the session cap
Set goals reachable inside eight sessions, name the interventions, then answer the time-horizon question against that number.
Prompts 5 and 6 — the two roles
State the counsellor's role and the client's role in the chosen theory's own vocabulary.
Prompt 7 — population and cultural fit
Say which populations the theory suits, then address Ana's documented circumstances: first-generation immigrant, Spanish-fluent, first-time client, estranged from a family she will not ask for help.
Prompts 8 and 9 — what is missing, and what could go wrong
Identify the information the file does not give, then name the risk that follows from this approach with this presentation.
Where the theory descriptions and cultural guidance live
Recommended databases
- PubMed / NCBI Bookshelf
- SAMHSA publications
- APA Style
- Course textbook on counselling theories
Search sequence
- 1.Read a reference description of the chosen theory before writing, so the concept names used are the theory's own.
- 2.Look up how humanistic and existential approaches are delivered in brief formats, since the case caps treatment at eight sessions.
- 3.Check federal guidance on culturally responsive practice before answering the cultural prompt.
- 4.Confirm the APA heading levels the brief's style resource specifies before formatting nine headings.
Sources for Person-Centered, Gestalt and Existential claims
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Person-Centered Therapy (Rogerian Therapy)
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, US National Library of Medicine · 2023
Congruence, unconditional positive regard and accurate empathy stated as the core conditions, with the non-directive stance spelled out. Use it for prompts one, five and six if person-centred is the choice, and for the argument against it otherwise.
- 02
Gestalt Therapy
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, US National Library of Medicine · 2024
The tools and techniques table, the present-centred emphasis, and the outcome evidence. This is the source for describing an active counsellor role and for judging whether an experiment-driven method suits a first-time client.
- 03
Brief Humanistic and Existential Therapies
Treatment Improvement Protocol 34, SAMHSA, NCBI Bookshelf · 1999
The chapter exists because these approaches had to be adapted to time-limited delivery. It is the reference that lets prompt four be answered against Ana's eight authorised sessions instead of in the abstract.
- 04
Improving Cultural Competence
Treatment Improvement Protocol 59, SAMHSA, NCBI Bookshelf · 2014
Federal guidance on culturally responsive behavioural health practice. Use it for prompt seven to ground the cultural answer in practice guidance rather than in assumptions about the client's nationality.
- 05
Headings
APA Style, American Psychological Association · 2026
The five heading levels and their formatting. The brief requires each of nine prompts under a separate heading, which makes this the difference between a formatted paper and a marked-down one.
Before the analysis is submitted
Common mistakes
- Answering the short- versus long-term prompt from the textbook without mentioning that Ana's insurance authorised eight sessions.
- Praising the chosen theory without arguing against the two that were rejected, which is the whole of prompt two.
- Reading Ana's cultural needs off her nationality when the intake note records that she will not ask her family for help.
- Naming a risk that would be true of any counselling approach instead of one that follows from this one.
- Leaving the ten-pound weight loss, the insomnia and the flat affect out of the analysis entirely.
- Writing four hundred words on the first prompt and one sentence on the ninth, then cutting the analysis to fit the word count.
- Switching theories mid-paper because a later prompt is easier to answer with a different one.
Submission checklist
- One theory is named in the opening and used consistently through all nine answers.
- Each of the nine prompts has its own heading, in the order the brief gives them.
- The eight-session authorisation appears in the answer about short- versus long-term counselling.
- The comparison answer names both rejected theories and says what each would have done differently.
- The cultural answer quotes or cites something in the intake note rather than generalising from nationality.
- The risk named could not be written about every therapeutic approach.
- Word count falls between 750 and 1,000, excluding the title and reference pages.
- At least three scholarly references appear in text and in the reference list, in APA format.
- Headings follow the APA levels in the style resource the brief points to.
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
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Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.