Outpatient Treatment of Psychosis: Psychodynamic Approaches to Evidence-Based Practice

by David L. Downing

$47.95

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Author: David L. Downing

Publisher: Routledge

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1782203346
ISBN 13: 978-1782203346

This book offers a practitioner's guide to evidence-based practice in working with psychotic patients in an outpatient setting by clinicians and scholars who are internationally recognized for their work in treating severe psychopathology. Topics cover conceptual, technical, and practical considerations in the parameters of working with adult and adolescent populations that exhibit thought disorder, delusions, hallucinations, borderline organizations, trauma, and schizoid phenomena. Different theoretical models are presented from psychoanalytic traditions that introduce the student and practitioner to eclectic ways of conceptualizing and treating these challenging clinical groups. Concrete approaches to establishing a proper treatment environment, working alliance, symptom management, managing countertransference, and facilitating a therapeutic framework are provided. Various psychodynamic techniques are demonstrated by master clinicians through the extensive use of clinical case material culled from outpatient settings that illustrate how psychoanalytic perspectives enrich our understanding of the psychotic spectrum and lead to therapeutic efficacy.

Review

"This book has a morally compelling message and fills a critical need. Despite perceptions that all people who struggle with psychosis are in hospitals, institutional day programs, or homeless shelters, many are treated effectively as outpatients. Despite a scarcity of helpful literature, most psychotherapists work with at least a few people who suffer psychotic anguish. The wisdom, practical reflection, and therapeutic passion that pervade this book are long overdue and welcome. I recommend it to all therapists and students of therapy, irrespective of their discipline and theoretical orientation." (Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Visiting Full Professor, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, and author of Psychoanalytic Diagnosis 2017-02-03)

"Outpatient Treatment of Psychosis challenges the medical-scientific narrative that the treatment of choice for psychosis is with medications and evidence-based therapies. This esteemed group of scholars and clinicians step into the void created by the disappearance of the community mental health centre to offer the private practitioner’s office as a new space for people with psychotic experiences to come and speak in a confidential therapeutic discourse. Grounded in rich clinical vignettes, each chapter is premised on the radical idea that psychotic symptoms have rhythm and rhyme, and meaning and purpose. This book presents a variety of contrasting theoretical models in working with people looking for viable alternatives to a regime of medicine and pseudo-scientific approaches. It is, at once, informative and inspirational, revolutionary and refreshing, and respectful of the people who come to engage in a very human discourse of understanding." (Patrick B. Kavanaugh, PhD, author of Stories from the Bog: On Madness, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis 2017-02-03)

"This book shares many years of experience in the outpatient treatment of psychosis. It will be
a useful resource for therapists." (Bertram P. Karon, PhD, ABPP, co-author of Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia 2017-02-03)

"This volume is so very rare because it works as a passionate document for our times, demanding reform (political, social, therapeutic) critical to the resolution of psychotic disorders. It is a work that comes out of the starting blocks full speed ahead and its urgency and acuity gives the contemporary reader what is needed to be up to date in the battle – and that is what it is – to liberate millions of human beings from the senseless incarcerations imposed by decades of misguided “treatments” of psychotic selves. I hope it lands on the desks not only of clinicians, but also politicians, judges and attorneys, journalists, and those invested with a duty of care to the most vulnerable people in our midst." (Christopher Bollas, PhD, author of When the Sun Bursts 2017-01-03)

About the Author

David L Downing

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Outpatient Treatment of Psychosis: Psychodynamic Approaches to Evidence-Based Practice