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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
This psychotherapy approach emphasizes the use of a case conceptualization to guide the therapist's use of standard cognitive–behavioral interventions. A case formulation includes a description of the patient's overt problems as well as hypotheses about some of the core beliefs (schema) that drive and maintain both the overt problems and the patient's mode of responding to and coping with the overt problems.
Other central features of Dr. Person's approach include the following:
- Set a primary therapeutic goal of alleviating, solving, or eliminating overt clinical problems and symptoms. As part of the emphasis on solving overt problems, therapists work with patients to measure these problems, whenever possible, in concrete, objective terms so that the outcome of the therapy can be monitored and assessed.
- Adopt an active, problem-solving approach to clinical problems.
- Focus on the here-and-now rather than the past. An effective therapist obtains a good family and social history. This information is important for several reasons, particularly in developing a useful case conceptualization. The therapist may even spend some time working on past events, but this is generally done in the context of helping the patient solve here-and-now difficulties.
- Build a collaborative patient–therapist relationship. The therapist does not solve the patient's problems; the therapist works with the patient to develop solutions that are helpful to the patient.
- Maintain an empirical attitude, both with regard to the choice of the therapy modality itself (what does the outcome literature say about which treatment approach is most effective for the problems presented by this patient?) and with regard to the conceptualization and interventions used to treat each particular patient.
- Rely on cognitive and learning theories that view clinical problems as understandable within a framework of reciprocally connected behaviors, cognition, and affects that are activated by environmental events, including, of course, interpersonal events.
- Assign homework. The key role of homework in cognitive–behavioral therapy draws directly on the view of therapy as a learning experience in which the patient learns new perceptions and skills.
Return to Cognitive–Behavior Therapy
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