Chapter 31.Brief Psychotherapies

Brief psychotherapy refers to a class of treatments that seek to accelerate change through the active, focused interventions of therapists and enhanced patient involvement. Treatment is designed to be brief and is limited from the start to less than 6 months or fewer than 24 sessions. In the past several decades, various brief approaches to therapy have evolved, ranging from single-session treatments and several sessions of strategic interventions to short-term psychodynamic modalities that frequently exceed 20 sessions. At the same time, rigorously performed outcome studies of brief therapy have matched patients and presenting concerns likely to benefit from specific approaches. This has also led to the application of brief therapies to a wider range of patients, including targeted interventions for severe conditions, including schizophrenia. The overarching message from this research is that the value of short-term work is significant but also highly dependent on the characteristics of patients and their therapists.