Synopses & Reviews
As a mental health professional, you know its a real challenge to help clients develop the psychological skills they need to live a vital life. This is especially true when you are working with time constraints or in settings where contacts with the client will be brief. Brief Interventions for Radical Change is a powerful resource for any clinician working with clients who are struggling with mental health, substance abuse, or life adjustment issues. If you are searching for a more focused therapeutic approach that requires fewer follow-up visits with clients, or if you are simply looking for a way to make the most of each session, this is your guide.
In this book, youll find a ready-to-use collection of brief assessment and case-formulation tools, as well as many brief intervention strategies based in focused acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). These tools and strategies can be used to help your clients stop using unworkable behaviors, and instead engage in committed, values-based actions to change their lives for the better.
The book includes a practical approach to understanding how clients get stuck, focusing questions to help clients redefine their problem, and tools to increase motivation for change. In addition, you will learn methods for rapidly constructing effective treatment plans and effective interventions for promoting acceptance, present-moment awareness, and contact with personal values.
With this book, you will easily integrate important mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based therapeutic work in their interactions with clients suffering from depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem.
Review
“This book is a must-read not only for ACT therapists with an interest in brief therapy, but for any ACT therapist who wants to improve their efficiency and effectiveness with the model. Low on theory and high on practicality, this book is choc-a-bloc full of new tools and techniques for brief but powerful ACT interventions. You’ll be amazed at how simple and easy it makes the trickier aspects of ACT, such as self-as-context and creative hopelessness. If you want to get better results in less time with more clients, then you need to read this book right now!”
—Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap
Review
“If you are looking for a rapid way to help people reduce their suffering and make positive changes, this book can show you the way. The four questions Strosahl, Robinson, and Gustavsson provide can give you a quick handle both on what's going on with clients and on how to help them change. A nice variation on the ACT method with some new insights and additions to make it compatible with clients' and third-party payers' demands for efficient and effective treatment.”
—Bill O'Hanlon, author of Change 101, A Brief Guide to Brief Therapy, and The Change Your Life Book
Review
“Brief therapy alert: This book is valuable reading for anyone interested in time-sensitive ‘brief’ therapy. It provides theory, methodology, research evidence, and numerous clinical examples for how to help clients rapidly make significant changes. It is also an excellent introduction to the larger field of acceptance and commitment therapy, offering concepts and techniques that clinicians can adapt to their own practices. Strongly recommended!”
—Michael F. Hoyt, PhD, author of Brief Psychotherapies and Interviews with Brief Therapy
Review
This book has the wrong title. It should be: Everything You Need to Know Stated Clearly, Free of Jargon and Hype that Will Enable You to Help a Broad and Diverse Range of Clients Effectively and Efficiently. On second thought, Brief Interventions for Radical Change, like the book, is more to the point.”
Scott D. Miller, PhD, director at the International Center for Clinical Excellence, Cummings professor of behavioral health at Arizona State University, and author of The Heart and Soul of Change
Review
“Strosahl, Gustavsson, and Robinson have written an inspiring book for all clinicians to read and to use in their daily practice. The genius of focused acceptance and commitment therapy is that it not only includes new insights, but it also dispels the myths about brief interventions. This book shows that a focused approach is exactly what many people need to help them recapture a sense of being fully alive.”
—Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, and coauthor of The Mindful Way Through Depression
Review
Brief Interventions for Radical Change is an excellent resource for primary care clinicians wanting to make efficient use of their time with patients. Its a practical guide for a patient-centered, functional approach, and provides case examples with individuals, couples, and groups.”
Debra A. Gould, MD, MPH, family physician and coauthor of Real Behavior Change in Primary Care, Improving Patient Outcomes and Increasing Job Satisfaction
Review
Grounded in ancient wisdom and the newest scientific evidence, this book provides a host of tools for those suffering from depression. Strosahl and Robinson invite us to take a wholly new view of what depression is, and how to deal skillfully with it through strategies born of acceptance and self-compassion. Their book shows the pathways into and out of depression and gives us a vital map to see clearly where genuine peace and freedom lie.
—Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology and Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the University of Oxford
Synopsis
Brief Interventions for Radical Change is a valuable resource for cliniciansa collection of fifteen to thirty-minute therapeutic interventions based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) that can be used to help clients overcome any psychological difficulty, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.
Synopsis
Mental health and chemical dependency clinicians are in a unique position to improve the lives of their clients, but find it difficult to provide clients with life-changing psychological tools they need within each time-limited appointment. Brief Interventions for Radical Behavior Change makes it easy for these busy clinicians to integrate important mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based therapeutic work in their interactions with clients. In just fifteen to thirty minutes, clinicians can identify core issues clients struggle with, apply acceptance interventions to help clients eliminate self-defeating thinking and behavior, and help clients engage in committed, values-based actions to change their lives for the better. The goal is to emphasize small, positive changes that cumulatively lead to radical changes in clients’ lives. These acceptance and commitment therapy-based interventions require minimal time and few follow-up visits, and are capable of catalyzing dramatic changes in clients. Brief interventions have been proven to have a significant clinical impact in helping clients overcome substance abuse, anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems. A must-have resource for every clinician seeking to hasten his or her clients’ recovery using cutting-edge techniques from mindfulness and acceptance therapy.
Synopsis
From Kirk Strosahl, cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression develops the revolutionary techniques of this new approach into a clear, step-by-step strategy you can use to live a rich and meaningful life with depression. Includes a CD.
Synopsis
There are hundreds of books that will try to help you overcome or put an end to depression. But what if you could use your depression to change your life for the better? Your symptoms may be signals that something in your life needs to change. Learning to understand and interpret these signals is much more important than ignoring or avoiding them-approaches that only make the situation worse. This workbook uses techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to offer a new treatment plan for depression that will help you live a productive life by accepting your feelings instead of fruitlessly trying to avoid them.
The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression will show you, step-by-step, how to stop this cycle, feel more energized, and involve yourself in pleasurable and fulfilling activities that will help you work through, rather than avoid, aspects of your life that are depressing you. Use the techniques in this book to evaluate your own depression and create a personalized treatment plan. You'll enrich your total life experience by focusing your energy not on fighting depression, but on living the life you want.
Includes a CD.
This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit — an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.
About the Author
Kirk Strosahl, PhD, is a cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy, a cognitive behavioral therapy that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance abuse community. He is the author of numerous articles on the subjects of primary care behavioral health integration, using outcome assessment to guide practice and strategies for working with challenging, high-risk, and suicidal clients. Along with Patricia Robinson, he coauthored the highly praised self-help book, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression. Strosahl currently works as a primary care psychologist at Central Washington Family Medicine, a community health center providing health care to a large medically underserved population. He is well-known nationally for his innovative approach to the integration of behavioral health and primary care services. Strosahl lives in Zillah, WA.
Patricia Robinson, PhD, is a director of clinical services at Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc., a firm specializing in providing consultation for health care systems seeking to integrate behavioral health services into primary care settings. She was a member of a pioneering research team that explored primary care-based behavioral health care in the 1990s. She then moved on to refine the primary care behavioral health model and apply it to delivery of health care services to underserved people in rural America, including migrant farm workers and members of the Yakima Nation. Robinson has consulted with numerous public and private health and mental health care systems, including the United States Air Force and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and six books, including Real Behavior Change in Primary Care, and is coauthor of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression.
Thomas Gustavsson, MSc, is a licensed psychologist and one of the founders of Psykologpartners, a company providing psychology and psychiatry services in Scandinavia. He has worked as a consultant for several community-based services, social workers, treatment centers, schools, and primary care clinics. In addition, he is one of the pioneers in building an integrated, evidence-based psychiatry program within a large primary care system in Helsingborg, Sweden. Gustavsson resides in Rydeback, Sweden.