Solution Focused Practice as a Brief Therapy

Solution Focused Practice as a Brief Therapy 

Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) is a brief approach or therapy to build solutions to various concerns of the clinical, subclinical and non-clinical population. Brief Therapy is defined as any psychological intervention intended to produce change as quickly as possible, whether or not a specific time limit set in advance (Eckert, 1993). Brief approaches to helping model have been gaining popularity among helping professionals. Various factors such as demand of clients to solve their problems quickly, financial constraints of clients to access long term therapies, clients having less time to involve in therapies, health care benefits wouldn't support for higher number of sessions and so on are a few of the reasons which clients and therapists to choose brief approaches. Solution-focused brief therapy has more than three decades of history ever since Steve de Shazer & Insoo Kim Berg and their colleagues developed it through an inquisitive approach towards existing practice. It is an approach to psychotherapy based on solution-building rather than problem-solving. It explores current resources and future hopes rather than the present problems, past causes and typically involves only three to five sessions. Solutions focused therapists viewed clients as an expert on their life and more importantly, what will be useful to them. SFBT can thus be defined as a client-centred and collaborative process. 

Over a period of time, the Solution-focused approach has gained an important place among the helping models as brief psychotherapy. It emerged as brief psychotherapy for mental health issues and has been widely experimented on the different conditions such as depression, anxiety, deliberate self-harm, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, marital issues, caregiver burden, adolescent parenting and so on.

Solution focused therapy is also one among the well-studied therapeutic model. Reports show that currently there are five meta-analysis and six systematic reviews have already been carried out. More than two hundred outcome studies were carried out in the different part of the world and among which 82 studies were randomized control trials (Macdonlad, 2015). The solution-focused intervention has also gained a place in the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP) of SAMHSA, US Federal Government (Macdonlad, 2015). It is also observed that Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is an effective approach to the treatment of psychological problems, with effect sizes similar to other evidenced-based approaches, such as CBT and IPT, but that these effects are found in fewer average sessions. Evidence gathered from these studies can be concluded that there are promising results from solution-focused therapeutic interventions among the different population and for their wide variety of concerns.