Formulation as A Basis for Planning Psychotherapy Treatment

To help their patients, clinicians must make accurate diagnoses and devise effective treatment plans. These plans often involve psychotherapy with goals that include symptom reduction, the prevention of relapse, and helping patients recognize and remove impediments to more effective functioning.

Formulation as a Basis for Planning Psychotherapy Treatment presents a formulation system that combines concepts derived from psychodynamic, interpersonal, cognitive-behavioral, and family system approaches. In a step-by-step manner, illustrated by plentiful case examples, this useful guide shows psychiatrists, residents in psychiatry and psychology, social workers, and marriage and family counselors how to plan treatment after the initial diagnosis.

After an overview of psychological change processes, each of the five steps in the formulation process are covered systematically. Case formulation is begun by the careful selection and description of a patient's symptoms and problems. This information is then grouped into states of mind, an approach that allows for multiple presentations of a patient, avoids static descriptions of observations, and places many observable features into meaningful clusters of co-occurrence.

Subsequent chapters explain how all of this information can be used to focus the treatment and identify defensive controls that may interfere with treatment. The author describes how to infer deep beliefs about the self in terms of views of relationships with others. The book teaches how to formulate plans for interventions during psychotherapy.

Mardi J. Horowitz, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Center on Stress and Personality at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California, San Francisco, California.