Main description:

Valuable patient-centered ideas for treating mental illness

Traditional forms of mental health care can often center more on simply avoiding hospitalization than on promoting wellness by focusing on a patient's personal feelings and hopes. In fact, these established methods can even have a dehumanizing and devaluing effect on a patient. Solution-Focused Brief Practice with Long-Term Clients in Mental Health Services is a practical introduction and guide that provides practitioners an alternative way of thinking about and working with individuals who have been long-term users of the mental health system. Through interviews, case studies, and actual client testimony, this valuable text demonstrates the most effective ways to establish patient-centered conversations that forge collaborative relationships, realize strengths, and use them to move toward healing.

Solution-Focused Brief Practice with Long-Term Clients in Mental Health Services is a strength-based approach that utilizes a client's personal and social resources to help them find a satisfactory solution to the sources of their need for professional help. This book offers a unique approach that can be applied to those who have been in the mental health system for many years and may remain so. Accessible and useable, this guide explores the meaning of conventional diagnosis and treatment and how both can actually reinforce the client's disability, chronicity, and sense of helplessness as a person.

Topics Solution-Focused Brief Practice with Long-Term Clients in Mental Health Services covers include:

the tools of solution-focused brief practice
working with borderline personality disorder
adaptability and application to different contexts
reading the client during discussion sessions
emphasizing an individual's healthy parts
the role of community support
rethinking the medical model
implementing solution-focused practices in agencies and hospitals
poststructuralism, social constructionism, and language games
and many more!

Solution-Focused Brief Practice with Long-Term Clients in Mental Health Services is extensively referenced with a detailed bibliography. It is an essential resource for psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, family therapists, counselors, nurse practitioners, and schools of social work and family therapy training programs. Staff of inpatient psychiatric hospitals, psycho-social clubs, and community mental health clinics will also benefit from this indispensable text.

Contents:

Foreword (Yvonne Dolan)
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Tools of Solution-Focused Brief Practice
Stance
Assumptions and Concepts
Practices
Conclusion
Chapter 3. Mary, the Borderline
I'm a Borderline, You Know
Chapter 4. I Have More of a Sound Mind Now
Appreciating the Ordinary
Conversations That Make a Difference: Nadine
A Difference That Makes a Difference
Conclusion
Chapter 5. Agoraphobia and Me Are Not Synonymous
De- and Re-Construction
Emotions in Therapy
Conclusion
Chapter 6. Rethinking the Medical Model
A Different Language Game
Solution-Building Conversations
What Does the Patient Say?
Psychiatric Medications
Conclusion
Chapter 7. Psychiatry Should Be a Parenthesis in People's Lives
Harry Korman
Alasdair Macdonald
Ralph Dahle
Sophie Duriez
Conclusion
Chapter 8. Meta-Systemic Considerations of Solution-Focused Brief Approach: Using the Ideas to Implement Solution-Focused Practices in Agencies and Hospitals
Joel's Experiences
Chapter 9. Philosophies that Inform Solution-Focused Brief Practice: Poststructuralism, Social Constructionism, and Language Games
Philosophy
Structuralism
Poststructuralism
Constructivism/Social Constructionism
Language Games
Epilogue
References
Index