This comprehensive manual offers specific how-to guidelines for conducting a wide range of psychotherapy groups and detailed session-by-session descriptions of sixteen structured group interventions. Time-limited, structured, educational, and goal-oriented, these groups focus on such core treatment issues as separation and divorce, alcoholism, bereavement, sexual abuse, fears and anxieties, anger management, weight loss, and encopresis.

"Subject Areas/Keywords: adolescents, art therapy, behavioral problems, brief, child psychotherapy, children, creative therapies, developmental disabilities, emotional problems, families, family, interventions, parents, play therapy, psychological disorders, short-term, solution-focused, trauma DESCRIPTION Illustrated with rich case examples, this widely used practitioner resource and text presents a range of play approaches that facilitate healing in a shorter time frame. Leading play therapists from diverse theoretical orientations show how to tailor brief interventions to each child's needs. Individual, family, and group treatment models are described and clinical guidelines are provided. Chapters demonstrate ways to rapidly build alliances with children, adolescents, and their caregivers; plan treatment for frequently encountered clinical problems; and get the most out of play materials and techniques."--

Group Play Therapy presents an updated look at an effective yet underutilized therapeutic intervention. More than just an approach to treating children, group play therapy is a life-span approach, undergirded by solid theory and, in this volume, taking wings through exciting techniques. Drawing on their experiences as clinicians and educators, the authors weave theory and technique together to create a valuable resource for both mental health practitioners and advanced students. Therapists and ultimately their clients will benefit from enhancing their understanding of group play therapy.

The Scope of Brief Therapy Within the last two decades there has been a dramatic expansion in the uses of short-term treatment (Grayson, 1979, Small, 1979). Brief therapies have been and continue to be widely used with a number of different patient popu lations in a broad variety of service settings. They have been reported in use with children, adolescents, adults~ and the aged; in groups, families, and individual treatment; on college campuses, high schools, in community mental health centers, in child guidance clinics, in private psychiatric clinics, in hospitals as part of out-patient or in-patient therapy, in programs of preventive community mental health; with the rich, the middle class, and the poor (Barten, 1971, 1972; Caplan, 1961, 1964; Small, 1979; Wolberg, 1965). Further, short term methods of therapy range across all of the major and well-known theoretical orientations found in the broader field of psychotherapy. There are some unique theoretical contributions which can be found within this field as well.

Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) is a manualised, time-limited model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy comprising twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers, designed so that it can be delivered within a public mental health system, such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the UK. It has its origins in psychoanalytic theoretical principles, clinical experience, and empirical research suggesting that psychoanalytic treatment of this duration can be effective for a range of disorders, including depression, in children and young people. The manual explicitly focuses on the treatment of moderate to severe depression, both by detailing the psychoanalytic understanding of depression in young people and through careful consideration of clinical work with this group. It is the first treatment manual to describe psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adolescents with depression.

This book describes Brief Strategic Family Therapy, a strengths-based model for diagnosing and correcting interaction patterns that are linked to troublesome symptoms in children ages 6 to 18.

This book provides in a comprehensive, integrative, analytic, and evaluative overview of the field of planned short-term psychotherapy that will be of great benefit to therapists already in practice. The author considers both clinical and methodological issues pertinent to planned short-term psychotherapy and he examines this emerging field in terms of its health policy implications. Emphasis is placed on actual as well as potential contributions of planned short-term psychotherapy to the field of clinical mental health practice. After describing the history of the field and examining the outcome studies that have evaluated brief psychotherapy, the author introduces and describes 17 different approaches. This is followed by a look at planned short-term psychotherapy in five different clinical settings--including medical settings and group and family settings. The final two chapters deal with general issues that affect the field. For professionals working in the field of psychology/psychotherapy.