Single Session Therapy

The Nature of Single Session Therapy

Any instance in which a therapist and patient meet for one and only one session with the objective of dealing with the patient's psychological difficulties can be defined as single session therapy (Talmon, 1990). Such instances, according to Talmon (1990), can occur in one of three ways:

(1) Prior to the session, both the patient and the therapist have agreed that the interaction will last only one session;

(2) Although the therapist plans for the patient to receive a longer period of therapy, the patient elects to terminate after one session; and

(3) Although the patient may feel that he or she needs more than one session, the therapist terminates therapy after the initial meeting; there can be many reasons for such a limitation but Talmon (1990) states that the two most frequent reasons are that the therapist does not feel that the presenting problem is psychopathological or he/she believes that no headway can be made with the patient at this particular point in time.

Regarding the fact that Single Session Therapy often occurs not by design or by the mutual consent of

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that: Without assuming direct causal relationship, it would seem that this single-session therapy approach has potential as a model of brief intervention of the "disabled" teacher. (p. 5) Single session therapy has also been utilized in the hospital outpatient clinic setting. Rosenbaum (1994), for example, explored single-session visits with 58 consecutive clients at an outpatient clinic by approaching the first interview as if it could be a complete therapy. At the end of the session, clients were offered a choice between "single-session therapy" and continuing in ordinary brief treatment. Findings revealed that 58 percent of the clients felt the single psychotherapeutic session was sufficient. It was suggested by Rosenbaum (1994) that it is possible to regard clients who come in for only a single visit as single-session therapies rather than as psychotherapy dropouts. It was also noted that: Because single-session therapies are naturalistic phenomena that adhere to no particular school of psychotherapy, they offer a potentially useful vehicle for studying psychotherapy integration, particularly the relative contributions of specific techniques, common factors, and nonspecific effects. (p. 229) Many hospital and medic
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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