Brief Interventions for Radical Behavior Change: Principles and Practice for Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

As a mental health professional, you know it’s a real challenge to help clients develop the psychological skills they need to live a vital life. This is especially true when you are working with time constraints or in settings where contacts with the client will be brief. Brief Interventions for Radical Change is a powerful resource for any clinician working with clients who are struggling with mental health, substance abuse, or life adjustment issues. If you are searching for a more focused therapeutic approach that requires fewer follow-up visits with clients, or if you are simply looking for a way to make the most of each session, this is your guide.

In this book, you’ll find a ready-to-use collection of brief assessment and case-formulation tools, as well as many brief intervention strategies based in focused acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). These tools and strategies can be used to help your clients stop using unworkable behaviors, and instead engage in committed, values-based actions to change their lives for the better.

The book includes a practical approach to understanding how clients get stuck, focusing questions to help clients redefine their problem, and tools to increase motivation for change. In addition, you will learn methods for rapidly constructing effective treatment plans and effective interventions for promoting acceptance, present-moment awareness, and contact with personal values.

With this book, you will easily integrate important mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based therapeutic work in their interactions with clients suffering from depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem.

Kirk Strosahl, PhD, is a cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy, a cognitive behavioral therapy that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance abuse community. He is the author of numerous articles about primary care behavioral health integration, using outcome assessment to guide practice and strategies for working with challenging, high-risk, and suicidal clients. Along with Patricia Robinson, he coauthored the highly praised self-help book, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression. Strosahl currently works as a primary care psychologist at Central Washington Family Medicine, a community health center providing health care to a large medically underserved population. He is well-known nationally for his innovative approach to the integration of behavioral health and primary care services. Strosahl lives in Zillah, WA.

Patricia Robinson, PhD, is a director of clinical services at Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc., a firm specializing in providing consultation for health care systems seeking to integrate behavioral health services into primary care settings. She was a member of a pioneering research team that explored primary care-based behavioral health care in the 1990s. She then moved on to refine the primary care behavioral health model and apply it to delivery of health care services to underserved people in rural America, including migrant farm workers and members of the Yakima Nation. Robinson has consulted with numerous public and private health and mental health care systems, including the United States Air Force and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and six books, including Real Behavior Change in Primary Care, and is coauthor of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression.

Thomas Gustavsson, MSc, is a licensed psychologist and one of the founders of Psykologpartners, a company providing psychology and psychiatry services in Scandinavia. He has worked as a consultant for several community-based services, social workers, treatment centers, schools, and primary care clinics. In addition, he is one of the pioneers in building an integrated, evidence-based psychiatry program within a large primary care system in Helsingborg, Sweden. Gustavsson resides in Rydeback, Sweden.