The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674003241 ISBN 13: 9780674003248

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

“All of us who have long done this work can look back at those happy times when the patient’s gain has also been, in part, our own. Thereby an extraordinary joy enters the work, for both parties, through this making of lives. Can there be better work to do in the world?”―from the Epilogue by Leston Havens
Managed care has radically reshaped health care in the United States, and private long-term psychotherapy is increasingly a thing of the past. The corporatization of mental health care often puts therapists in professional quandaries. How can they do the therapeutic work they were trained to do with clients whom they may barely know, whose care is intruded upon by managed care administrators? With unrelenting pressure to substitute medications for therapy and standardized behavior protocols for individualized approaches, what becomes of the therapist–client relationship?
Unflinchingly honest, The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice offers both compelling stories and practical advice on maintaining one’s therapeutic integrity in the managed care era. Resisting a one-size-fits-all approach, the authors focus on the principles of forming relationships with patients, and especially patients likely to be under-served (e.g., the uninsured poor) or difficult to treat.
The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice gives voice to therapists’ frustrations with the administrative constraints under which they work. But it accepts the reality and offers guidance and inspiration to committed therapists everywhere.

About this title

About the Author

Alex N. Sabo is Chairman of the Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Berkshire Medical Center and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Leston Havens was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Hospital.

Review

“A superb collection of essays of the highest quality that delivers in full what is promised in the title. Even the most experienced therapist will cherish the many therapeutic insights along with excellent nuts and bolts advice for the daunting new world facing the profession. Leston Havens's several brilliant essays are alone worth the price of the volume.”―Irvin Yalom, Stanford University

“Here are therapists working in the most difficult of circumstances, under time constraints, with gravely ill patients, with few resources. This collection of essays reshapes our understanding of the practical. Tact, clarity, the existential encounter―these human forces are what allow people to change. Sometimes affording hope, sometimes facing and bearing hopelessness, the senior clinicians assembled by Sabo and Havens show that there is no dark corner where the light of psychotherapy cannot be made to shine.”―Peter D. Kramer, Brown University, author of Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?

“In a world of limited hospital beds, limited time, and even more limited funds, it's become increasingly hard to make a place for, or understand how to incorporate, psychotherapy. This terrific book, both practical and inspiring, could change that, and make a real difference to the culture of the mental health professions.”―Tanya Luhrmann, University of California, San Diego, author of Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry

“[The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice] is designed to educate the novice, elucidate new and innovative techniques with difficult populations, and sustain workers in the field in these difficult times of managed health care... These approaches privilege emotional learning and affective connection above the formalistic and arbitrary trappings of older psychoanalytic models, and are more easily applied to treatment in a range of settings. In summary, this timely book demonstrates the complexity of the field, the collegiality of its editors, and provides a rich meal for the hungry clinician.”―Doreen Rothman, Ph.D., Berkshire Medical Journal

“The editors posit that establishing an effective relationship between the patient and the psychotherapist is the essential first step in all forms of psychotherapy. The authors of the book's 12 essays elaborate on this thesis through their experiences as therapists in a variety of professional endeavors with patients/clients in medical, mental health, and social programs.”―Donald J. Carek, M.D., Readings

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0674003241
• ISBN 13: 9780674003248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Sabo Alex N., Havens Leston