Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Psychotherapie
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Abstrakt

Contemporary Formulation-based Assessment and Treatment: A Framework for Clinical Discourse

Michael D. McGee

With the relentless push for efficient and effective mental health treatment, service delivery has evolved from inpatient and outpatient therapy to multi-component interventions provided collaboratively across a continuum of treatment settings by a range of disparate disciplines, including mental health providers, medical providers, case managers, social workers, residential and social service providers, and managed care stakeholders. This new paradigm for mental health treatment calls for a need to modify traditional psychodynamic case formulation approaches, which have focused primarily on synthesizing clinical data to inform predominantly long term psychodynamic therapy. This paper details a new approach to clinical formulation that allows for the provision of targeted, optimal, efficient, and effective care by linking a biopsychosocialspiritual understanding to a biopsychosocialspiritual suite of interventions executed by a coordinated, multidisciplinary team of service providers. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of strategies for implementing formulation-based assessments and treatment plans.