Staying With The Client

Abstract

Abstract Since the early seventies there have been widespread assumptions in social work that: (a) effective therapy is necessarily brief-lasting, at most, eight to ten sessions, and (b) that we should only deal with the problems that the client wants help with. The author challenges the universality of these assumptions, and their basis in research and considerations about supposed cost-effectiveness. He illustrates through a single case study of a depressed adolescent girl and her unhappy mother that although contact could have been terminated after ten sessions, when the identified patient was better, in fact it would probably have achieved very little, since intervention up to that point had had the effect of making the mother only too painfully aware of her life predicament and reducing her almost to despair. At the mother's request, social work contact continued for a further eleven sessions, spread over five months. She appeared to use this to achieve a considerable degree of acceptance of her pain...