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Solution-Focused Brief Practice with Long-Term Clients in Mental Health Services

"I Am More Than My Label"

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  • Price: $44.95 $40.46
  • Paperback: 196 pages
  • Also available in Hardback and e-Book
  • Published: October 2007
  • ISBN: 978-0-7890-2795-5
  • Publisher: Routledge

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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.

Table of 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

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