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Supportive Psychotherapy

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Tasman’s Psychiatry

Abstract

Supportive psychotherapy is the most widely practiced psychotherapeutic modality and has demonstrated clinical efficacy for many different patient types across a broad range of psychiatric disorders.

The major change agent producing a positive outcome in supportive psychotherapy is the therapeutic alliance. The therapeutic alliance is established at the outset of psychotherapy and maintained throughout the treatment by the use of supportive interventions and empathic therapist comments.

Supportive psychotherapy is a treatment that uses direct measures to reduce psychiatric symptoms. It does this by helping to improve self-esteem and adaptive skills. Important psychotherapeutic strategies include establishing and maintaining a strong therapeutic alliance, bolstering self-esteem, strengthening defenses, and the use of appropriate therapeutic disclosure and modeling. Interventional techniques include a more conversational empathic style of patient-therapist communication, acceptance, praise, reassurance, rationalizing, reframing, rehearsal, clarification, and confrontation. The focus is on the here-and-now, and real relationships, with less focus on transference issues.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, New York, NY, USA

    Arnold Winston & Adelle Schaefer

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

    Arnold Winston

  3. Department of Psychiatry, St. George’s Medical School, St. George, Grenada

    Arnold Winston

Authors
  1. Arnold Winston
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  2. Adelle Schaefer
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Correspondence to Arnold Winston .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Allan Tasman

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Cent, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Michelle B. Riba

  3. Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Oakland, CA, USA

    Renato D. Alarcón

  4. Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA

    César A. Alfonso

  5. Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Shigenobu Kanba

  6. Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

    David M. Ndetei

  7. Malaysian Research Inst on Ageing, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia

    Chee H. Ng

  8. Department of Psychiatry, University of Munich, München, Bayern, Germany

    Thomas G. Schulze

  9. Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia

    Dusica Lecic-Tosevski

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    César A. Alfonso

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Malaysia, Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    César A. Alfonso

  3. Ministry of Health Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

    Reham Aly

  4. Department of Psychological Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore, Singapore

    David Choon Liang Teo

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Winston, A., Schaefer, A. (2023). Supportive Psychotherapy. In: Tasman, A., et al. Tasman’s Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42825-9_38-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42825-9_38-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-42825-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-42825-9

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