Chill Pill  

A Florida teenager is behind bars as an accessory to the brutal murder of 16-year-old Jacob Hendershot. But that may not be the most shocking part of the crime - Stephanie Fistey says she believes she's part vampire and part werewolf.

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Florida police say that, in July, Fistey's friends lured Hendershot to a house, killed him, and then left his body in a storm drain. Police had originally said Hendershot's was murdered because Fistey had accused the 16-year-old of raping her, according to CBS affiliate WTSP.

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Five people so far, including Fistey, are charged in connection to the crime with either murder or accessory after the fact.

Police have previously speculated that there may be more to the case. They say the murder suspects may have been involved in a vampire cult, WTSP reports, and Fistey's claims to vampiredom appear to give credence to the idea.

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In a jailhouse interview, Fistey told local station, "Since I was like, 12...I know this is going to be crazy, but I believe that I'm a vampire. Part of a vampire and part of a werewolf."

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Studies have shown that client perceptions of the alliance are particularly important to positive therapeutic outcome (Bachelor, 2013; Bedi, Davis, & Williams, 2005; Horvath, 2001), and that therapists vary in their abilities to establish strong alliances with a range of different clients (Del Re, Fluckiger, Horvath, Symonds, & Wampold, 2012).

 

For clients, important factors to a successful alliance include being able to approach and trust the therapist, sensing that the therapist has a nonjudgmental stance, feeling a sense of equality in the therapeutic relationship, and therapist attentiveness (Manso & Rauktis, 2011; Ribner & Knei-Paz, 2002; Simpson & Bedi, 2012). Indeed, an insufficiency of these factors, as perceived by clients, is likely to result in a poor alliance; thus, therapists should continually strive to be accepting, open, nonjudgmental, and fully attentive to client needs and belief systems.

 

Despite professional admonitions for therapists to be open, nonjudgmental, and sensitive to human diversity, Vasquez (2007) reported that unintentional bias might be part of the therapist-client interaction and significantly impair the alliance.

 

Vasquez’s analysis helps explain underutilization of services and high dropout rates by people of color, and she further suggests that unintentional therapist biases and subsequent microaggressions—encounters that convey attitudes of dominance and superiority—also can occur toward clients who occupy other positions of minority status.

 

In other words, clients who differ significantly from their therapists on factors that are socially constructed as less desired, such as race and ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation or identity, socioeconomic status, disability status, or religious affiliation, are more likely to experience alliance issues. For example, clients in minority positions may be hesitant to be authentic and to disclose important information about themselves out of fear of being rejected.