Supportive psychotherapy
Supportive psychotherapy is a psychotherapeutic approach that integrates various therapeutic schools such as psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral, as well as interpersonal conceptual models and techniques.
The objective of the therapist is to reinforce the patient's healthy and adaptive patterns of thought behaviors in order to reduce the intrapsychic conflicts that produce symptoms of mental disorders.
Freud found that by letting people talk freely about whatever came to mind (free association), they eventually revealed the origins of their psychological conflicts in disguised form.
Franz Alexander studied Freud, and although he was trained in classical psychoanalytic technique, he began to evolve his own ideas about what allowed the curative process to occur in therapy.
[5] Alexander noted that in classical psychoanalysis, the essential requirement for change was the insight the patient gained from interpretation of the transference neurosis.
Alexander agreed with Freud that during psychoanalysis the patient underwent transference based on earlier life experience and emotional traumas.
As defined in earlier years, supportive psychotherapy is a body of techniques, such as praise, advice, exhortation, and encouragement, embedded in psychodynamic understanding and used to treat severely impaired patients.
Supportive psychotherapy is often practiced for patients who are considered lower functioning, too fragile, or too unmotivated to participate in more demanding expressive therapy, which might have more chance of leading to personality change.
[10][11][12][13] Additionally, supportive therapy is recognized as the treatment of choice for patients seen by psychiatrists and residents who are suffering from extra-psychic problems, such as poverty, social and political oppression, and abuses of power in relationships that threaten to overwhelm their coping capacities.
Using the explaining behavior strategy within supportive psychotherapy allows for therapists and health professionals to lead patients to areas of comfort or security as they navigate complex and overwhelming emotions or compulsions.
Therapists and professionals help guide patients to understanding how repeated behaviors or emotions contribute to their mental health and symptoms.
Using encouragement in this environment combines opportunities for education and movement in order to bring patients upward in their treatment or outside of their comfort zone.
Giving patients the tools necessary to develop self-soothing habits in opposition to unhealthy acting-out behavior, such as extreme mood swings, substance abuse, or acting out.
Therapists in the behavior therapy groups used a manualized, highly structured treatment protocol that included relaxation training and systematic desensitization in imagination, specific in vivo desensitization homework assignments, and assertiveness training (including modeling, role playing, behavior rehearsal, and in vivo homework assignments).
The therapists doing supportive therapy were instructed to be empathic and non-judgmental and to encourage patients to ventilate feelings and discuss problems, anxieties, and interpersonal relationships.
