The therapeutic personality in the therapeutic community.

Identified personality characteristics associated with the rated ability of various types of mental hospital support personnel to interact in a therapeutically beneficial manner with patients. The Gordon Personal Profile, the Gordon Personal Inventory, the Work Environment Preference Schedule, and an experimental mental health aptitude test were administered to the female support personnel in 6 state hospitals (N = 257). Ss judged by peers to be the more effective were inclined to take their responsibilities seriously, to be emotionally stable, to be cautious, to have trust and confidence in other people, to be nonbureaucratic in their work orientation, and to be aware of the therapeutically preferred procedures for handling patients. Few significant relationships were found with the supervisory ratings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The responsible psychotherapist.

Contends that psychologists in general, and psychotherapists in particular, have been concerned with both ethical and legal liability. Contracts, informed consent, and participatory decision making have been recommended as requisites for an ethical psychotherapy. However, when the various types of responsibility (role, causal, capacity, and liability) are differentiated, it becomes clear that the recommendations entail an inconsistent set of assumptions. These recommendations ignore difficulties in establishing liability. It is suggested that since there may be inherent conflicts between effective psychotherapy and the ethical recommendations that have been made, future recommendations should be relative to a particular theory of psychotherapy. (97 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The residential therapeutic caring community.

The residential therapeutic caring community (RTCC) for adolescents combines psychotherapeutic principles of the professional model and self-help concept of the therapeutic community by using the collective resources of members to mobilize peer pressure. The RTCC is a safe, structured, supportive treatment environment that employs a confrontation, teaching, interpretative, and reasoning approach and uses the psychotherapeutic principles of reality therapy and existential thought. In the RTCC, the staff serve as mentors and role models, and they demonstrate their concern by maintaining high expectations for immediate improved behavior. The personal qualities necessary for a psychotherapist working in an RTCC are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychotherapist and one-way intimacy.

Several prominent psychotherapists have asserted that many therapists use their relationships with clients to gratify desires for controlled, "one-way" intimacy in which they are less vulnerable than the clients. The present experiment tested the hypotheses that (1) therapists have higher needs for control and intimacy than the normative population; (2) need for control is negatively related to quantity and quality of family involvement; and (3) therapists categorized as pseudo-intimate have higher need for control than those categorized as intimate. The FIRO-B and assessments of structured interviews by blind raters provided data on 26 male practicing psychotherapists (aged 29–61 yrs) and 28 male doctoral students (aged 24–48 yrs). None of the hypotheses were supported. Therapist and trainee need scores were similar, and both groups had lower needs for inclusion and needs to be influenced by others than are the norm. Roughly two-thirds of the therapists were categorized as intimate and one-third as pseudo-intimate. Results do not support the idea that therapists gratify their neurotic needs through working with clients. Implications for future research and for therapist selection and training are discussed. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The dimensions of change in therapeutic community treatment instrument.

In this article, the authors describe the refinement and preliminary evaluation of the Dimensions of Change in Therapeutic Community Treatment Instrument (DCI), a measure of treatment process. In Study 1, a 99-item DCI, administered to a cross-sectional sample of substance abuse clients (N = 990), was shortened to 54 items on the basis of results from confirmatory factor analyses and item response theory invariance tests. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analyses of the 54-item DCI, completed by a longitudinal cohort of 993 clients, established and validated an 8-factor solution across 2 subpopulations (adults and adolescents) and 2 time points (treatment entry and 30-days postentry). The results of the 2 studies are encouraging and support use of the 54-item DCI as a tool to measure treatment process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discharge from a therapeutic community

5 S RNA of Chironomus thummi larvae was purified from total phenol extracted RNA by gel filtration and labelled to about 10(7) dpm/mug with carrier-free iodine-125. After hybridization in situ of 125I-5 S RNA and autoradiography only region B3c-e (containing two "normal" and two very faint bands) of chromosome II of salivary gland cells was highly labelled. In chromosomes of an animal showing pairing discontinuities a clearly "heterozygous" labelling of the 5 S RNA region was found. Region B3c-e shows no clearcut morphological signs of puffing or autoradiographically detectable 3H-uridine incorportion in spite of a continuous synthesis of 5 S RNA in salivary gland cells.     

The sexist psychotherapist: An ephemeral species.

Comments on G. Stricker's (see record 1977-29882-001) article on research implications for psychotherapy with women, noting that Stricker presents a confusing and circular argument regarding the evidence of sexism in psychotherapy. The relationship between therapists' attitudes and their actual behavior in therapy was not addressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychotherapist and the managed care setting.

This study represents a beginning effort to understand how alternative health care delivery systems affect psychotherapists and psychotherapy practice style. Professionals from various mental health disciplines employed in staff-model health maintenance organizations (N?=?43) served as interviewees. Therapists answered objective and semistructured questions about their work setting, "burn-out," graduate training, and the evolution of self and practice style. Although methodological limitations prohibit meaningful and valid generalizations, the results suggest that alternative health care settings may serve as catalysts by creating an atmosphere that shapes and influences the therapist to develop more eclectic, short-term, problem-focused psychotherapy practice habits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Therapy on a treadmill: The role of the prison psychotherapist.

Argues that psychotherapy in prisons does not and cannot work, that it may be an unethical endeavor, that it should not be routinely practiced, and that a "rehabilitation" model may be inappropriate for prisons. More research is needed to identify necessary conditions for effective psychotherapy, and psychologists must define the conditions under which its practice is contraindicated. When introduced into appropriate environments, psychological services must be systematically evaluated. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The therapeutic community and new roles for clinical psychologists.

"The psychologist in the therapeutic community, as in many other settings, does formal class teaching with psychology interns, nurses, psychiatric technicians and other student and staff personnel in such subject areas as psychopathology and group psychotherapy and other group techniques. He also provides community education through talks to lay groups." The psychologist may have an administrative role; as a team member he may have the role of assistant team leader, or of acting team leader in the psychiatrist's absence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of therapists' training on group therapeutic outcome.

The outcome of group therapy for psychotic patients was used as the dependent variable in assessing the comparative efficacy of trained and untrained therapists. The latter were undergraduate students with no training or experience in psychotherapy. For this reason, their role in psychotherapy was viewed as analogous to that of a placebo in studies assessing drug effects. Changes in psychological test performance of 295 patients before and after 5 mo. of group therapy served as the criterion of therapeutic behavior change. By comparison to an untreated control group the lay therapists achieved slightly better results than psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers doing group therapy with similar patients. Caution is urged in extending the implications of these results beyond group therapy with schizophrenic patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychotherapist and informed consent

The authors points out that psychotherapists are being increasingly required by law to function as instruments of social control. He believes it is incumbent on therapists to employ full and informed consent procedures with their patients in regard to the effects of providing psychiatric information to potential employers, insurance carriers, and other third parties.     

Preliminary results of a video-assisted psychotherapist workshop in alliance strategies.

This study examined the preliminary results of an integrative, video-assisted training workshop aimed at helping psychotherapists build strong therapeutic relationships with their clients. Participants were 57 clinicians across five community mental health clinics, who were randomly assigned to the brief alliance-training workshop (in which they participated prior to starting treatment with a new client) or to a delayed-training control condition. Outcomes assessed included therapist-reported use of alliance strategies during Session 1, therapist-rated alliance quality after Session 1, and client engagement across the first 4 weeks. In contrast to hypotheses, one-way analyses of variance and chi-square analyses revealed no statistically significant differences between the training and the delayed-training conditions. However, the therapist-reported impact of using the workshop's alliance strategies was positively correlated with therapist-rated alliance quality (r = .30, p = .03) and marginally correlated with number of sessions attended (r = .25, p = .06) across the two conditions. The findings hold promise for the utility of a brief alliance-focused workshop, and for collaborations between researchers and clinicians seeking to bridge science and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cost effectiveness of clinical training in a community mental health center.

The future of professional psychology may well rest on psychology training programs successfully defending their existence in purely monetary terms. This article examines the effectiveness of the training program of an urban mental health center that includes an American Psychological Association-accredited psychology internship. The training program was found to produce net revenues for the facility and to meet the training needs of its participants. Variables related to producing a cost effective psychology training program are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pop sociology and the psychotherapist.

Suggests that G. W. Albee (see record 1977-29846-001) holds a model of a psychotherapist as one who loosens inhibitions and frees sensuality. It is suggested that psychotherapy actually attempts to integrate all impulses and realities within a value or philosophic context, not a context of hedonistic sensuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)