By: Vijay Kumar Verma ( Editor-ICN Group )
SHIMLA: Indian Psychiatric Society, Bihar branch organised a presentation on “Application of Ultra brief therapy in a Busy OPD” at Patna. In his presentation, Dr Mohd Aleem Siddiqui of Lucknow stressed that among mental health patients many patients needed psychological therapy in addition to medications. But there is a very severe lack of trained clinical psychologists. He therefore suggested that a doctor must keep Psychotherapy principles in mind while dealing with such patients.
With high load of patients in hospitals in India, he said, a tailor made approach is taken in such a scenario. Since majority of the books on the subject were written by foreign authors in context with the prevailing circumstances in those countries the same mechanism cannot be applied in India. He said that as every patient can’t be referred to a clinical psychologist the doctors were trained to invest a few extra minutes to gain from therapy principles, where therapy needs multiple sessions of about an hour each.
The main points of discussion in the presentation were on:
• RAPPORT of paramount importance.
• Psycho-education: model of illness in palatable terms
• Bibliotherapy: Information ready a prior eg printouts, web references, display boards.
• Dos and DONTs
• Paraphrasing
• Reality not as dangerous as thoughts
• New meaning to events
• Belief as hypotheses, not a fact
• Think in long term
• Behavior is bad-not the person
• Asking for solutions from the patients and care givers.
•Always have patient welfare in mind.
.Use the therapy as per situation.
.Refer for therapy proper as needed.
