Practical Approaches to Alcoholism Psychotherapy

📘 There exists among many clinicians an underlying assumption that interpersonal skills essential to treating alcoholism cannot be clearly defined, written about, or taught to others. As a result, many clinicians exhibit an attitude of therapeutic helplessness, reinforcing the tendency to overlook the presence of alcoholism as they treat its physical, social and economic consequences, and discouraging alcoholics and their families from seeking professional help. This new book is designed to help demystify these skills, providing practitioners and public health workers with an arsenal of theory and "how-to" techniques for the psychotherapy of alcoholism. Written by clinicians from a variety of fields who have been successful in the treatment of alcoholism, this work offers a textbook guide to the general principles and practices of various types of psychotherapy through the use of case studies. Modified treatment approaches for a variety of subpopulations - adolescents, women, the elderly, and the socioeconomically deprived - illustrate how alcoholism manifests itself in different patterns among heterogeneous populations. The authors also provide a separate chapter on how to evaluate patient progress as a guide for practitioners and students in assessing clinical effectiveness.