In this controversial book, psychologists Barry Duncan and Scott Miller, cofounders of the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change, challenge the traditional focus on diagnosis, "silver bullet" techniques, and magic pills, exposing them as empirically bankrupt practices that only diminish the role of clients and hasten therapy's extinction. Instead, they advocate for the long-ignored but most crucial factor in therapeutic success-the innate resources of the client. Based on extensive clinical research and case studies, The Heroic Client not only shows how to harness the client's powers of regeneration to make therapy effective, but also how to enlist the client as a partner to make therapy accountable. The Heroic Client inspires therapists to boldly rewrite the drama of therapy, recast clients in their rightful role as heroes and heroines of the therapeutic stage, and legitimize their services to third-party payers without the compromises of the medical model.
The Therapist's Notebook on Strengths and Solution-Based Therapies offers multiple pathways for those in helping relationships to employ strengths and solution-based (SSB) principles and practices as a vehicle for promoting positive change with individuals, couples, and families. The 100 exercises in this book are based on a series of core principles that are not only central to solution-based therapies; they have been demonstrated through research as essential to successful outcome. Readers will learn about processes and practices that are supported by research and are collaborative, competency-based, culturally sensitive, client-driven, outcome-informed, and change-oriented. The text is categorized into seven parts, each formatted similarly to ensure easy accessibility. Practitioners will find their therapy enhanced, with a greater ability to improve their clients' well-being, relationships, and social roles.
More than any other text on the market, The Heart of Counseling is effective in helping students to understand the importance of therapeutic relationships and to develop the qualities that make the therapeutic relationships they build with clients the foundation of healing. In these pages, students come to see how all skills arise from and are directly related to the counselor’s development and to building therapeutic relationships. Student learning ranges from therapeutic listening and empathy to structuring sessions, from explaining counseling to clients and caregivers to providing wrap-around services, and ultimately to experiencing therapeutic relationships as the foundation of professional and personal growth. The Heart of Counseling includes: extensive case studies and discussions applying skills in school and agency settings specific guidance on how to translate the abstract concepts of therapeutic relationships into concrete skill sets exploration of counseling theories and tasks within and extending from core counseling skills videos that bring each chapter to life test banks, instructor’s manuals, syllabi, and guidance for learning-outcomes assessments for professors
Solution-Focused Cognitive and Systemic Therapy: The Bruges Model is the first book in English to lay out the Bruges Model, a meta-model that incorporates solution-focused therapy in an analysis of the therapeutic alliance and common factors that account for the majority of the efficacy of any therapeutic endeavor. This book is divided into three parts, covering each of the common factors: client factors, therapist and relationship factors, and placebo factors. Each part summarizes the state of our theoretical knowledge, then dives into specific clinical and educational applications in specific populations and contexts.
Insightful interviews with a Who’s Who of the world’s foremost therapists Therapy’s Best is a lively and entertaining collection of one-on-one interviews with some of the top therapists and counselors in the world. Educator and psychotherapist Dr. Howard G. Rosenthal talks with twenty of therapy’s legends, including Albert Ellis, arguably the greatest clinical psychologist and therapist of our time; assertiveness training pioneer Robert Alberti; experiential psychotherapist Al Mahrer; and William Glasser, the father of reality therapy and choice theory. Each interview reveals insights into the therapists’ personal lives, their observations on counseling, and the helping profession in general, and their thoughts on what really works when dealing with clients in need. The interviews found in Therapy’s Best uncover treatment strategies that are often missing from traditional textbooks, journal articles, courses, and seminars related to assertiveness training, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), marriage and family counseling, transactional analysis, psychoanalysis, suicide prevention, voice therapy, experiential psychotherapy, and Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT). Conversations with the “best and brightest” (including two recipients of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychotherapy’s “Living Legends” award) reveal why these therapists are such effective helpers, what makes their theories so popular, and most important, what makes them tick. This unique book lets you “rub elbows” with these consummate professionals and learn more about their theories, ideas, and experiences. Therapy’s Best includes interviews with: Dr. Albert Ellis—creator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and APA Division of Psychotherapy “Living Legend” Dr. Edwin Schneidman—the foremost expert on suicide prevention, suicidology, and thanatology Richard Nelson Bolles—author of What Color Is Your Parachute? Dr. Dorothy and Dr. Ray Bevcar—husband and wife therapists who write textbooks on marriage counseling Dr. Al Mahrer—father of experiential psychotherapy and APA Division of Psychotherapy “Living Legend” Les Greenberg—father of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) Muriel James—co-author of Born to Win and many more! Therapy’s Best is a must read for professionals who practice counseling and psychotherapy, students preparing to do likewise, and anyone else with an interest in therapy—and the people with provide it.
A highly practical book for all mental health professionals wanting to know how to apply positive psychiatry in their daily work Positive psychiatry is the science and practice of psychiatry and clinical psychology that seeks to understand and promote wellbeing among people who have or are at high risk of developing mental health problems. In this new approach, the person takes center stage, not the disease, and the focus is not only on repairing the worst, but also on creating the best in our patients.. The authors from the fields of medicine and clinical psychology present over 40 applications and many cases and stories to illustrate the four pillars of positive psychiatry: positive psychology, solution-focused brief therapy, the recovery-oriented approach, and nonspecific factors. The book shows how mental health professionals can significantly increase patient collaboration to co-create preferred outcomes through discovering possibilities and competencies and through building hope, optimism, and gratitude. Essential reading for psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, other professionals working in the field of mental health care as well as students who want to take a positive focus to make psychiatry faster, lighter, and yes, more fun. We have high hopes that positive psychiatry will become a firm part of the psychiatry of the future.
Written by practitioners for practitioners, this empirically-grounded book offers clinicians of all backgrounds a guide to incorporating feedback and self-development strategies that will dramatically enhance their therapeutic abilities. Building on the foundation of Feedback-Informed Treatment (FIT), Beyond Best Practice explores the benefits of practicing therapy using in-the-moment client feedback, with an emphasis on ongoing, typically solitary, deliberate practice. Chapters describe the real-world journey of an established master therapist and her agency, examining each element of FIT in detail through her eyes. Her journey is illustrated through discussions with prominent researchers, authors, former clients, as well as informative experiences outside of psychotherapy. Rich case examples of success, failure and "failing successfully" are also woven throughout, with a focus on the practical applications and skills needed to become an excellent and effective therapist and agency. What becomes clear through the many narratives is that we can improve our services by studying the obvious and subtle forms of feedback that are available to us at all times. Beyond Best Practice emphasizes what each practitioner can do to become more effective, one client at a time. It will be essential reading for all mental health practitioners and agencies working at the front lines of medical care.
Today’s greatest health challenges, the so-called diseases of civilization—depression, trauma, obesity, cancer—are now known in large part to reflect our inability to tame stress reflexes gone wild and to empower instead the peaceful, healing and sociable part of our nature that adapts us to civilized life. The same can be said of the economic challenges posed by the stress-reactive cycles of boom and bust, driven by addictive greed and compulsive panic. As current research opens up new horizons of stress-cessation, empathic intelligence, peak performance, and shared happiness, it has also encountered Asian methods of self-healing and interdependence more effective and teachable than any known in the West. Sustainable Happiness is the first book to make Asia’s most rigorous and complete system of contemplative living, hidden for centuries in Tibet, accessible to help us all on our shared journey towards sustainable well-being, altruism, inspiration and happiness.
This book provides a new generation of research in which scholars are investigating mental health and human development as not merely the absence of illness or dysfunction, but also the presence of subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is a fundamental facet of the quality of life. The quality of an individual’s life can be assessed externally and objectively or internally and subjectively. From an objective standpoint, other people measure and judge another’s life according to criteria such as wealth or income, educational attainment, occupational prestige, and health status or longevity. Nations, communities, or individuals who are wealthier, have more education, and live longer are considered to have higher quality of life or personal well-being. The subjective standpoint emerged during the 1950s as an important alternative to the objective approach to measuring individual’s well-being. Subjectively, individuals evaluate their own lives as evaluations made, in theory, after reviewing, summing, and weighing the substance of their lives in social context. Research has clearly shown that measures of subjective well-being, which are conceptualized as indicators of mental health (or ‘mental well-being’), are factorially distinct from but correlated with measures of symptoms of common mental disorders such as depression. Despite countless proclamations that health is not merely the absence of illness, there had been little or no empirical research to verify this assumption. Research now supports the hypothesis that health is not merely the absence of illness, it is also the presence of higher levels of subjective well-being. In turn, there is growing recognition of the personal and social utility of subjective well-being, both higher levels of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing. Increased subjective well-being has been linked with higher personal and social ‘goods’: higher business profits, more worker productivity, greater employee retention; increased protection against mortality; increased protection against the onset and increase of physical disability with aging; improved cognitive and immune system functioning; and increased levels of social capital such as civic responsibility, generativity, community involvement and volunteering. This edited volume brings together for the first time the growing scientific literature on positive mental health that is now being conducted in many countries other than the USA and provides students and scholars with an invaluable source for teaching and for generating new ideas for furthering this important line of research.
The text, Writing Measurable Outcomes in Psychotherapy, may be of interest to anyone who is interested in how therapists help clients with their problems. The author has created a model taken from cognitive psychology to simplify how to tackle problems and provides a quick method to identify where one is "situated in thinking about their problem". The model is based on Bloom's Taxonomy, an educational theory used by teachers to evaluate student learning: remember, understand apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Also discussed are key elements of psychotherapy: the importance of a strong relationship, assuring that clients remain as expert in their life and that they give feedback about the therapy.
