Treatment Resistance and Patient Authority (The Austen Riggs Reader)

The Austen Riggs Center is nationally recognized as the leading psychiatric hospital for treatment-resistant patients, who willingly seek help but just cannot respond to treatment. Here, leaders in treating such challenging patients offer a comprehensive psychodynamic approach for treatment and offer hope for recovery. In this book, readers are given an in-depth view into the psychodynamics systems perspective of treatment resistant disorders, with illustrations of the value of including family therapy, and developing and using a psychodynamic treatment team. Also offered is the first description published in book form of the newly-defined area of psychodynamic psychopharmacology—an approach to the use of medications that attends to the meaning of medications to the patient and clinician, as well as to their pharmacologic effects. Important clinical problems such as trauma, psychosis, suicide, family resistant, integrated treatment, and psychopharmacologic failures are covered in detail. Throughout, practical principles are reported in text boxes to help the reader apply learning from Riggs to other outpatient, residential, day treatment, and inpatient settings. The Austen Riggs Center is on the forefront of dealing with difficult-to-treat patients, and this book provides an invaluable resource for both understanding treatment resistance and implementing effective techniques to treat it in clinical practice.