Strategic Therapy & Interventions of New York

BST - Theoretical and pragmatic aspects

Last update By C. Moretto Monday Jun 16 2008 22:10

The research methodology for the construction of protocols of intervention developed at the Strategic Therapy Center of Arezzo is the same used by advanced sciences (Popper, 1972), like Physics or Biology in order to create evolved management systems of the studied realities.

The research method has 3 phases:

• First, study the specific characteristics of a problem or a class of problems.
• Then, detect the attempted solutions that have been generally used to solve this class of problems.
• Third, change these “attempted solutions”, which instead of solving the problem, fuel it, with other solutions that have been able to produce the desired effects (Watzlawick, Nardone, 1997).

This empirical experimental research methodology is used to construct specific intervention protocols. Specific intervention protocol is a set of formalized and auto corrective guidelines relative to the intervention praxis and techniques that will be applied to the typology of the problem to solve.

When a protocol for intervention has been developed, the successive phase is a thorough verification of its efficacy and efficiency. With this objective, the protocol will be applied to at least 100 cases that present the same pathology issue of the study. If the efficacy is superior to 70%, that is only if at least 70 of the 100 treated cases are cured because of the intervention, the protocol is then declared valid in term of therapeutic efficacy. The newly created protocol must also demonstrate its stability over time. In this respect, follow-up sessions are performed at 3 months, 6 months, and one year from the end of the therapy in order to monitor the intervention efficacy and the stability over time of the realized results.

Research projects to update the already created protocols and to develop protocols for newly emerging problems is a constant feature at the center of Brief Strategic Therapy in Arezzo and at its affiliated centers.

Therapy and application of the intervention protocols.

The choice and the application of various intervention protocols is based on the type of problem presented and always adapted to the uniqueness of each individual and to uniqueness of each therapy itself. A protocol is not a sequence of rigid moves, but rather, open to various operative possibilities in function of the patients’ responses to the therapists’ moves. Based on this, the strategic therapist, following a flexible path, chooses the most promising options among those available, and if needed, changes strategy when the one applied is not yielding the expected results. This makes the application of each protocol to each single case something unique and not repeatable, even if the protocol guidelines remain unchanged.

The work of the BST affiliated therapists is constantly supervised and verified by Prof. Nardone. The annual results of all therapists are collected, measured, and analyzed in order to obtain a constant monitoring of both the therapist’s performance and the efficacy and efficiency of Brief Strategic Therapy to cope with wide-ranging psychological problems.

As shown by the numerous essays published by Giorgio Nardone (Clinical Bibliography), the results obtained over 20 years of evaluating thousands of directly treated cases by Prof. Nardone or by affiliated therapists, have demonstrated the efficacy (the ability to solve of the problem) and efficiency (the ability to solve the problem in a brief way) of the strategic approach. This success includes dealing with various psychological disorders and maintaining the achieved results stable over time.