Is it possible to give the person asking for psychological support what they need, when they need it?
We are confronted with a society and people that have changed a lot compared to just a few years ago. In a previous article (The future of psychotherapy) I reported some data on the trends and prospects of the health system, particularly in the area of mental health.
How should the psychologist’s approach change accordingly, in order to continue to reach and help people?
Single Session Therapy can be integrated in different ways within professional practice. One of these is to use it for particular problems.
So far we have dealt with how to integrate TSS into professional practice, starting first with the description of the method and the theoretical principles underlying it, then exploring the possible areas of intervention, up to experiencing it in the therapeutic context.
But in practice, how is Single Session Therapy carried out?
In the article Where to practice Single Session Therapy I considered in which contexts this framework can be used and with which orientations it can be integrated. I have also declined, as you have read in the previous articles, Guidelines and Principles of the 3 main models (Californian, Canadian and Australian) that practice Single Session Therapy in the world.
In many states, a new way of offering psychotherapy and psychological counseling has been taking place for several years: walk-in services. What are? And why should we know them and begin to implement them too?
Try thinking about an event that changes your life.
Done?
Now write it down and remember what happened. define the time for the event that changed and re-oriented your life. In most cases, the duration of significant events isn’t that long, isn’t it?
Taking a cue from daily life, you will have realized that often a corrective emotional experience (Alexander, 1946) is something that in a short time generates unexpected changes and progress.
Sometimes it happens that some people suffer from ailments and symptoms related to their personal history, their way of constructing reality, the dynamics in which they are inserted, etc. Other times it is external events that get a grip on us and create such an upheaval as to bring even the most balanced and equipped personalities to their knees.
By now you know, the reason that prompted Moshe Talmon and his research group to start research in Single Session Therapy was a significant fact: in psychotherapy the most frequent number of sessions is 1.
Talmon, Hoyt, and Rosenbaum verified this finding on over 100,000 patients and was subsequently confirmed by studies around the world (Talmon, 1990; Hoyt, Rosenbaum & Talmon, 1990; Weir et al., 2008; Hoyt & Talmon, 2014).
Being a psychotherapist is a profession. But I think that it cannot be “just” a profession: Its characteristics make it probable (if not desirable, or even necessary) to find inside elements such as vocation, passion, intellectual honesty, responsibility … However, it is certainly also a profession. And it is certainly not the first nor the only, which puts itself at the service of people to help them overcome a state of malaise or to achieve more complete well-being.
This raises a crucial question: the trained psychotherapist, to continue doing his job, must be able to conduct an economically sustainable activity. Otherwise in a short time he will be forced to stop his activities.
The question at this point is: does Single Session Therapy lead precisely to this risk?
When it comes to Single Session Therapy, three possible scenarios can be configured, starting from the same setting of the therapeutic intervention.
In a nutshell, referring to the classic subdivision of Talmon (1990), we can say that essentially a SST can be of 3 types:
Single session therapy and its peculiarities described by Martin Soderquist, interviewed by Flavio Cannistrà. During the interview Dr. Soderquist explains and tells us about the very beginning of his use of single session therapy with couples and what lead him and his colleagues to apply such a therapy, also discussing the results achieved.