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

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.

Joel K. Simon, Thorana S. Nelson

- 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