Don't Lose Your Patients
Responding to Clients Who Want to Quit Treatment
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Jason Aronson Publishers
Published:1st Aug '98
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Premature termination—patient dropout, in Dr. Herbert s. Strean's dependably conversational idiom—is a blow to the therapist's self-esteem, professional status, and pocketbook. Traditionally, responsibility for it has been imputed to the patient's resistance or lack or loss of motivation. In keeping with contemporary recognition that the therapeutic process is a reciprocally influential partnership, however, Dr. Strean teases out and examines the therapist's role in the divorce. He brings forty years of professional practice to the challenge of recommending appropriate interventions for sustaining the therapeutic relationship at whatever stage termination is threatened, be it right at the outset, during the honeymoon phase, in the face of the first treatment crisis, or later still. As a bonus, Dr. Strean shares his guiding perspectives on treatment. They include careful listening, a non-judgemental approach, and constant awareness of the therapist's own all-too-humannes.
Dr. Herbert Strean shares the thoughtful insights of an experienced and sensitive clinician about how we inadvertently push our patients out of treatment at each stage of the process from the first phone call on. Even the most seasoned of us will learn more about what we are doing—to the benefit of our case loads to be sure, but, more important, to the benefit of our patients. -- Betram P. Karon, Michigan State University
Dr. Strean's heartfelt, clinically expert conviction that preventing premature termination is essential in promoting healing stands in refreshing contrast to the prevailing managed care view that no psychotherapeutic process can be too brief. -- Gerald Schames, Smith College School of Social Work
Herbert Strean has a knack for tackling the most significant problems in the practice of psychotherapy and coming up with clear, pragmatic solutions. We know that the patient dropout rate is very high, and in this volume Dr. Strean analyzes the many reasons therapists lose clients, often before treatment has really begun. Using copious clinical vignettes and drawing on up-to-date psychodynamic concepts, he steers clinicians through the shoals of patients' ambivalence, resistance, and negative transference, as well as their own counterresistance and countertransference. The book's unadorned, jargon-free writing and abundant clinical wisdom make it a pleasure to read and an invaluable aid to both helping and keeping our patients. -- Stanley B. Messer, Rutgers University Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology
ISBN: 9780765701718
Dimensions: 215mm x 161mm x 24mm
Weight: 476g
248 pages