COUN 510 Project: Case Summary of Dr. Gregory House's Problems

This assignment is a case summary and analysis of the fictional character Dr. Gregory House from the television show 'House'. The paper, prepared for a COUN 510 project, delves into Dr. House's client history and presents his problems, focusing on his personal, occupational, and relationship issues. The analysis highlights his struggles with depression, substance abuse, and difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships, as well as his unorthodox approach to his profession. The paper references his background, including his strained relationship with his father, and his addiction to alcohol. The assignment follows APA format, providing a comprehensive overview of the character's psychological challenges.

Running head: ENGLISH
English
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Case Summary and Presenting problems of Dr. Gregory House
Client History
The selected character for this paper is Dr. Gregory House of the medical drama series House. It
is a fictional character that always leads the team of diagnosticians as he is the head of the
Diagnostic Medicine in the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital at Princeton in New Jersey.
It is also a fictional character as well. The diagnostic approaches that have been shown in this
show and the attitude of Dr. Gregory House are generally much unorthodox (Lapostolle et al.,
2013). The character has always received some positive reviews that have increased the
popularity of the show in various ways. Dr. House has been shown as a person who lacks the
sympathy for his patients. This practice always helps the character to allot him the proper time
for solving the several pathological enigmas. House loves his mother but hates his father
completely for some reasons (Witzel, Koch & Kaminski, 2017).
Presenting Problems
The character in this Dr. Gregory House is looking for some ways to solve some of the problems
that have occurred as problems in his personal, occupational and relationships. In the following
sections some important issues regarding his life would be discussed.
Personal functioning
Dr. Gregory House has been facing some serious troubles of depression and substance abuse
disorder. The connection between the substance abuse and mental illness is immense. It has been
regarded as a mental illness and he has been suffering from it over a long time (Witzel, Koch &
Kaminski, 2017). Depression also occurs among people with the substance abuse disorders very

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frequently. He has often been seen to drink or abuse the drugs so that he can escape from the
different issues of despair and the feelings of guilt. Substance like alcohol may opt to increase
the level of depression as it works as a depressant in the body of the users.
Relationships
Dr. Gregory House has some several problems in his relationships as well. He believes that his
father has an ‘insane moral compass’ and that is the reason that he hates his father. Before he
took up medicine as his professional discipline he had thought of making a research on the dark
matter and become a PhD in Physics. During a time Gregory House told that he was lefty by his
parents to his grandmother who abused him as his punishments (Hirt et al., 2013). However, he
had later confessed that his father had abused him only. Before the show began he entered into a
relationship with Stacy Warner who was a constitutional lawyer. Some medical complexities
also created some gaps between Stacy and House and afterwards Stacy had left her.
Occupational Relationships
Some spiritual health complexities had been seen in the life of Gregory House as well. Later
House got addicted to the alcohol and this had affected the professional career of his to a certain
extent as well (Gelfand & Cleveland, 2013). He could speak several languages like English,
Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Mandarin and many more. This made him able to communicate with
his patients from different cultural backgrounds.

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References
Gelfand, M. S., & Cleveland, K. O. (2013). Family outbreak of psittacosis with an exhumation-
based diagnosis: following in the footsteps of Dr. House. The American journal of the
medical sciences, 345(3), 252-253.
Hirt, C., Wong, K., Erichsen, S., & White, J. S. (2013). Medical dramas on television: a brief
guide for educators. Medical teacher, 35(3), 237-242.
Lapostolle, F., Montois, S., Alhéritière, A., De Stefano, C., Le Toumelin, P., & Adnet, F. (2013).
Dr House, TV, and Reality…. The American journal of medicine, 126(2), 171-173.
Witzel, K., Koch, H. J., & Kaminski, C. (2017). Impact of medical TV shows on preprocedural
fear of surgical in-house patients. European Surgical Research, 58(3-4), 121-127.