The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice [Hardcover]

All of us who have long done this work can look back at those happy times when the patients 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 HavensManaged 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 therapistclient relationship?Unflinchingly honest, The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice offers both compelling stories and practical advice on maintaining ones 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.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.Here are therapists working in the most difficult of circumstances, under time constraints, with gravely ill plsí