Customer Reviews

Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention: The 1-2-3s of Treatment Planning (Practical Resources for the Mental Health Professional)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention

The 123's of Treatment Planning is a timely resource for therapists in the age of managed care. This is a pragmatic and helpful reference for conceptualizing and writing treatment plans that should meet insurance, managed care, and national quality guidelines. There are descriptions of major DSM-IV disorder groups, along with general treatment goals and accompanying objectives for consideration. These plans are from a cognitive behavioral viewpoint. For graduate students, this first section will provide guidelines for treatment planning. For experienced professionals, it will provide reminders, help fill in some blanks, and encourage the use of some new techniques. The second section is on the clinical assessment of special circumstances. The red flag issues of suicide, homicide and grave disability assessments are covered in a succinct and straight forward manner. This is an excellent review for post doctorates preparing for a licensing exam. There are also assessment guidelines for chemical dependency, child abuse, spousal abuse, child custody evaluations and Worker's Compensation disability evaluations.

The third section covers skill building for patients. It is an assemblage of file folders that most of us keep on general areas that are helpful to our clients. Areas covered include: management of stress, anger, anxiety and depression, relaxation, communication, dealing with chemical dependency, and parenting.

The final section deals with forms, both of a clinical and business nature, that are used on a daily basis in independent practice offices. Many experienced independent practitioners will find this helpful when they wish to update their forms.

The Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention is thorough, practical, and ethical. It is a reference source for graduate students, clinicians preparing for their licensing exams, and for seasoned professionals.

Michael F. Antrim, Ph.D.

Sharon Johnson provides a valuable service to graduate students in counseling or clinical psychology with publication of the Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention: The 1-2-3's of Treatment Planning. I recommend this volume to my graduate students in psychology who are preparing for a professional milestone such as a comprehensive exam or licensing interview. Several year's worth of detailed knowledge is presented clearly and succinctly in this compact, practical overview of "everything you thought you knew about psychotherapy but can't call to mind just now". We recently added the Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention as a required text for our graduate course in Advanced Individual Psychotherapy, and the students are grateful to learn of such a direct, practical guide to standard practices, diagnostic criteria, and documentation. Because it is designed as a handy reference, the Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention does not cover every style of therapy or therapeutic technique, but it does cover a wide variety of approaches to therapy. The index makes it easy to find what you need quickly. In an informal survey, our students of marriage and family therapy preferred Johnson's treatment planning manual to other similar references.

"The Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention is a wonderful addition to my office reference library! It is a comprehensive "guide" to writing treatment plans, and organizing data for easier documentation. This guide is a much appreciated time-saving resource. I recommend this book as an additional reference guide for any therapist in private practice."

A time saver that keeps me sane!!! Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

This book is priceless in my eyes. It has earned its price countless number of times. This book includes everything from Psychoeducation handouts, treatment plan information, assessment, administrative paperwork and much more. I have used this book on a daily basis in my clinical practice and continue to refer to it regularly. The amount of work put into this book is enormous and I appreciate every bit of it. Thank you Sharon and i look forward to more workbooks, etc . Im sure anything you create will be magnificent.

Highly, highly, highly recommended.

This =is= a terrific text for certification and re-certification preparation... albeit with some caveats. Most of what Johnson has pulled together =is= "good stuff," as far as it goes. But there's a lot that isn't included, and some of what is included is more in the nature of "good ideas" than truly evidence-based treatment.

I'm also forced to agree with some of the one-, two- and three-star-giving reviewers that the book =is= poorly organized, even if it flows fairly well from one topic to the next, but for me, that's less of an issue than some of it's recommendations and many of it's fairly obvious exclusions.

Johnson's training appears to have occured at the apogee of the cognitive-behavioral and family systems eras. Her notions of therapy are essentially behavioristic and/or cognitive, which is fine, but only insofar as what those approaches to therapy can accomplish. Which makes TG2CI a sort of "therapy light" if one is up against a personality-disordered adult molested as a child with the sort of dense defense mechanisms typical in such people. Having worked with quite a few in the past two-plus decades, I'd have been utterly helpless in the face of their mysteries and manipulations if I'd been solely an REBT, CBT, CAT, SIQR or schematherapist.

That said, I admit that third-wave psychodynamic, experiential ("Gestalt-plus"), interpersonal and new-wave neuropsychological approaches tend to defy this sort of organization. And that may be the book's essential fault. Johnson has sought to reduce psychotherapy to a series of outlines. And for the patient with two or three overlapping Axis II compilations, let alone three or four in borderline organization, a series of outlines (even like those provided by the estimable Teddy Millon, Seth Grossman, Aaron Beck and Arthur Freeman) is wholly inadequate.

Those considerations aside, this book =does= belong on your bookshelf. No other text I know of has as much "procedural" material between its covers, let alone all the assessment forms one can lay down on top of copier. At twice the price, it would be a bargin in that respect.

Just don't buy it thinking that "all" the answers -- or even useful synopses thereof -- are between its covers.

This is a wonderful resource that I use in my counseling practice everyday. It's filled with a variety of handout info pertaining to the most frequent problem presentations.

This book is great for group planning, and very helpful in treatment plans also...a great time saver!

I have already recommended this book to many of my colleagues. It covers so many topics and provides practical, useful information for psychoeducation and treatment options. I don't know what I would do without it. I would love to see workbooks and printouts by this author.

I was surprised at how disorganized this book is. There are lots of typos and no discernible structure. There are some good tips and ideas but many of them, without context, don't make a lot of sense.

I think this is good when I am stuck writing a treatment plan and I know the kinds of things I want to start doing but I am having trouble putting words to it.

However, if this book was given some structure and contextualized the tips, it would be much, MUCH more useful.