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The last two decades have seen unprecedented increases in health care costs and, at the same time, encouraging progress in psychotherapy research. On the one hand, accountability, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency have now become commonplace terms for providers of mental health services whereas, on the other hand, an increasingly voluminous literature has emerged supporting the effectiveness of a number of types of psychotherapies. There now exists the possibility for the design and delivery of mental health services that-drawing upon this literature-more closely approximate empirically established data concerning the appropriateness and effectiveness of psychotherapy. The Handbook of the Brief Psychotherapies is intended to capture one major thrust of this movement: the development of a group of empirically grounded, time-limited therapies all sharing a common interest in the clinical utilization of a structured focus and an emphasis on time and action. For many years, professional self-interest, competing theoretical para digms, and the vagaries of practice, wisdom, and clinical myth have influenced the practice of psychotherapy. A critical questioning of the resulting, predomi nantly nondirective, open-ended, and global therapies has led to a growing emphasis on action-oriented, problem-focused, time-limited therapies. Yet, ironically, this interest in the brief psychotherapies has not so much involved a radical departure from traditional therapeutic modalities as it has emphasized a new pragmatism about how time, action, and structure operate in life as well as in therapy.

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The Brief Psychotherapies.- The Therapeutic Interaction Research Perspectives.- An Integrative Model for Short-Term Treatment.- Brief Treatment and Mental Health Policy.- Technical Issues.- Innovations in Family Therapy Strategies for Overcoming Resistance to Treatment.- On Time in Brief Therapy.- Tasks in Brief Therapy.- The Challenge of Single-Session Therapies.- Individual Approaches in Brief Psychotherapy.- Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy.- Cognitive Therapy.- An Introduction to Cognitive-Behavior Therapy.- Interpersonal Psychotherapy of Depression (IPT).- Crisis Intervention as Brief Psychotherapy.- Family and Marital Brief Therapies.- Family Crisis Therapy.- Brief Behavioral Marital Therapy.- Strategic Psychotherapy.- A Systems Therapy.- Short-Term Marital Therapy.- Brief Psychotherapy for the Sexual Dysfunctions.- One Person Family Therapy.- Brief Group Approaches.- Short-Term Group Therapy.- Social Skill Training in Short-Term Groups.- Short-Term Therapy Groups for Schizophrenics.- Brief Crisis Therapy Groups.- Psychodrama in Short-Term Psychotherapy.

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