[1] In clinical practice, formulations are used to communicate a hypothesis and provide framework for developing the most suitable treatment approach.
Most systems of formulation contain the following broad categories of information: symptoms and problems; precipitating stressors or events; predisposing life events or stressors; and an explanatory mechanism that links the preceding categories together and offers a description of the precipitants and maintaining influences of the person's problems.
"[23]: 154 In place of nosological categories, Kelly used the word "formulation" and mentioned two types of formulation:[24]: 337 a first stage of structuralization, in which the clinician tentatively organizes clinical case information "in terms of dimensions rather than in terms of disease entities"[23]: 192 while focusing on "the more important ways in which the client can change, and not merely ways in which the psychologist can distinguish him from other persons",[23]: 154 and a second stage of construction, in which the clinician seeks a kind of negotiated integration of the clinician's organization of the case information with the client's personal meanings.
[25] Psychologists Hans Eysenck, Monte B. Shapiro, Vic Meyer, and Ira Turkat were also among the early developers of systematic individualized alternatives to diagnosis.
[26]: 4 Meyer has been credited with providing perhaps the first training course of behaviour therapy based on a case formulation model, at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London in 1970.