Logos in Psychotherapy: The Phenomena of Encounter and Hope in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship

2006 ◽  
pp. 259-268
Author(s):  
Camilo Serrano Bónitto
Keyword(s):  
Psychotherapeutic Relationship

The Placebo Effect

2018 ◽  
pp. 422-428
Author(s):  
S. Nassir Ghaemi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Placebo Response ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pharmacological Properties ◽  
Psychiatric Illnesses ◽  
Psychotherapeutic Relationship ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Depressive Episodes ◽  
Psychological Benefit

Until the 1960s, physicians in the United States could legally prescribe “placebo” on a prescription pad and handed to a patient. It was not unethical to do so. Placebo had long been known to be an effective treatment for various medical conditions. For millennia, physicians new that many of their treatments were ineffective and that many conditions could not be treated. Instead of giving treatments that have some pharmacological properties, which meant they would have some side effects and be harmful in some way, it was viewed as more ethical to give an inert pill, a placebo, which would cause no direct pharmacological harm. The view was that the patient might get some psychological benefit from the apparent treatment. The placebo response involves two major aspects: natural history and psychological expectation. Too much attention is given to the latter and not enough to the former. Clinicians see patients improve, as in acute depressive episodes, due to natural history, but they attribute such benefit to the drugs they use, or their psychotherapeutic relationship. Often Nature deserves the credit, and clinicians need to pay more attention to the natural course of psychiatric illnesses.

Voluntary and involuntary admission to a subacute psychiatric hospitalization unit

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. S567-S567
Author(s):  
O. Orejas ◽  
P. Flores Martínez ◽  
C. Macías Castellví ◽  
M.T. Campillo Sanz ◽  
M. Vallvé Elias ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Hospitalization ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Involuntary Hospitalization ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Psychotherapeutic Relationship ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
Spss Software ◽  
Competing Interest ◽  
Transversal Study

IntroductionInvoluntary admissions continue to be a controversial topic in psychiatry. However, it is well known that psychosocial rehabilitation treatment is more successful when the patient is involved in it improving awareness and adherence to treatment.ObjectivesThis study examined admissions patterns, including voluntary, involuntary, and partly voluntary admissions to a subacute psychiatric hospital.MethodsThis is a transversal study. All patients admitted for a medium-term psychiatric treatment since 01/06/2014 to 30/11/2015 were included. Patients's basic sociodemographic and clinical data were collected and compiled in a database. Descriptive statistics were performed using SPSS Software.ResultsA total of 88 patients (52% men; mean age: 48.6 years) composed the sample. In 58% of cases, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder were the diagnoses motivating the admission. Among 88 patients, 44 (50%) had voluntary admissions, 16 (18.2%) had involuntary admissions, 27 (30.7%) had partly voluntary admissions and just one patient (1.1%) had partly involuntary admissions. Seventy-one (80.1%) patients had voluntary admissions at discharge, and only one of them escape from hospital and did not finish the treatment.ConclusionsIn the short term involuntary hospitalization has benefits, however also can have adverse long-term consequences for the patient-therapist allegiance, breaking the psychotherapeutic relationship and making the patient abandon treatment. It's important to reassess the condition of admission and work with the patient the need to engage in treatment.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

scholarly journals “Like I’m Talking to a Real Person”: Exploring the Meaning of Transference for the Use and Design of AI-Based Applications in Psychotherapy

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Holohan ◽  
Amelia Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Mental Healthcare ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Psychotherapeutic Practice ◽  
Healthcare It ◽  
Psychotherapeutic Relationship ◽  
Therapeutic Encounter ◽  
Real Person ◽  
Development Trajectories

AI-enabled virtual and robot therapy is increasingly being integrated into psychotherapeutic practice, supporting a host of emotional, cognitive, and social processes in the therapeutic encounter. Given the speed of research and development trajectories of AI-enabled applications in psychotherapy and the practice of mental healthcare, it is likely that therapeutic chatbots, avatars, and socially assistive devices will soon translate into clinical applications much more broadly. While AI applications offer many potential opportunities for psychotherapy, they also raise important ethical, social, and clinical questions that have not yet been adequately considered for clinical practice. In this article, we begin to address one of these considerations: the role of transference in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Drawing on Karen Barad’s conceptual approach to theorizing human–non-human relations, we show that the concept of transference is necessarily reconfigured within AI-human psychotherapeutic encounters. This has implications for understanding how AI-driven technologies introduce changes in the field of traditional psychotherapy and other forms of mental healthcare and how this may change clinical psychotherapeutic practice and AI development alike. As more AI-enabled apps and platforms for psychotherapy are developed, it becomes necessary to re-think AI-human interaction as more nuanced and richer than a simple exchange of information between human and nonhuman actors alone.

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