Multiple therapy in private psychiatric practice.

Abstract

This paper is based on our experiences in combining forces to treat certain of our private patients (N = 29) in individually-planned therapeutic programs, generally consisting of an integration of psychotherapy and physical-treatment procedures, one therapist devoting himself exclusively to psychotherapy, the other to physical treatments and supplementary psychotherapy as new psychodynamic constellations emerged during the treatment. On the whole, these 29 patients comprised a particularly treatment-resistant group of severe mood disorders. The fact that nevertheless 75% of them achieved either full or social recovery, a figure statistically not significantly different from that of 61% for a group of 201 unselected psychotic and borderline states treated by a single therapist with physical treatment methods and/ or psychotherapy, suggests that the particular difficulties encountered in the present group of patients were adequately met by the treament method described. We were interested to find that where...