Introduction to Psychotherapeutic Interventions
Psychiatric disorders have become a common mental illness both in children and adults. Proper management of various psychiatric disorders at an early stage is of foremost importance, which is also critical to the clinical outcomes of patients. Although pharmaceuticals treatment plays a significant role in treating many psychiatric disorders, psychotherapeutic intervention is still an important means of therapy for clinicians.
Psychotherapeutic intervention is a new type of treatment that often includes the conversations and interactions between a therapist, and a patient or family member. The purpose of the whole intervention is to help patients or families understand the problems, regulate the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to improve the quality of life. In principle, the professional needs to listen carefully to the patient from different angles. Meanwhile, they also need to analyze their experience, understand their situation, and recognize their relationship with their family. Till now, a wide variety of therapeutic interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, group therapy, play therapy, and family therapy, have been widely used for treating child psychiatric disorders. As a whole, psychotherapy intervention can be divided into three main subtypes, supportive, re-educational, as well as psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Psychiatric Disorders
There is a growing emphasis on the development of psychotherapeutic Interventions for psychiatric disorders. Many attempts have been made to develop perfect methods to assess the effectiveness of these interventions. Furthermore, new techniques should be also established for selecting the best intervention models to improve the treatment effect for every patient. Currently, the data have shown that cognitive behavior therapy and psychodynamic therapy are mostly used and studied intervention models for anxiety disorders or depression. Among them, cognitive behavior therapy is designed to examine and understand the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of patients as a team. In psychodynamic therapy, therapists and children typically work together without the presence of parents. A new confidential and psychologically safe zone will be created to help therapists explore the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of patients.
The Steps of Psychotherapeutic Interventions
The common steps of psychotherapeutic interventions in the treatment of different psychiatric disorders:
Assessing the problems of patients with psychiatric disorders is important to the success of these interventions. Therapists should gather information from different aspects, such as family members, friends, teachers, and colleagues. A detailed history-taking helps to develop and initiate psychotherapy procedures.
In some cases, patients may hide or fail to accurately describe their problems, so establishing a rapport with patients is extremely essential. Therapists should respect patients' ideas, and should make face-to-face communication with patients and their family members.
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Developing a treatment plan
After fully understanding the severity of the patient's illness, the therapist should select the suitable intervention models or therapeutic alliance to make the intervention plan. For instance, supportive psychotherapy is usually suitable for all age groups, but cognitive behavior therapy can be only used for older children or adults. Besides, a series of factors, including clinical diagnosis, client choice, availability of time, should be further considered for suitability for psychotherapy.
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Starting psychotherapeutic intervention sessions
In general, psychotherapeutic interventions can be classified into five stages, the introduction, the opening, the body, the closing, as well as the termination. The therapist should observe and record the patient's performance at each stage and provide comfort and support to patients at the end of each session.
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