We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2018
To many, psychotherapy represents the least medical end of the continuum of skills that make up psychiatric competence. Training in the area has often been patchy and although most people accept the value of the psychotherapy experience for trainees, the practical difficulties within the organisation often limit the exposure that trainees can obtain. Recently, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has modernised and updated its curriculum and this has happened as much for psychotherapy as for other topic areas.
The modernised psychotherapy curriculum, as it applies to basic trainees, focuses on two core areas where psychotherapeutic competencies are important. The easiest of these to define is the aim that trainees should have a basic knowledge of the main modalities of psychotherapy, be able to implement basic psychotherapeutic strategies and techniques, and be rational prescribers of psychological treatments. To that end trainees are asked to acquire theoretical knowledge in the field of psychotherapy and also to gain practical experience in the treatment of two patients. These should be in two different modalities and of two different durations. Each of these cases should be formally evaluated and submitted as a workplacebased assessment.
The second area that the psychotherapy curriculum tries to develop is what can be termed ‘the psychotherapeutic attitude’. This represents a way of approaching the experience and difficulties of patients that is at the same time empathic, developmental, narrative and psychologically literate. In the psychotherapeutic attitude relatively more weight is given to ideographic (drawing on themes and narratives) than to nomothetic (drawing on statistical or categorical) explanations, and care and effort are expended in developing and maintaining emotional and mental closeness with patients. The capacities that comprise this attitude are core to the practice of all psychiatric specialties. Helping trainees to develop the psychotherapeutic attitude is a broadly based enterprise that will occur in all areas of training but in the specific area of psychotherapy the mechanism of the case-based discussion is used both as a training and an evaluative tool and is the focus of the second main workplace-based assessment in psychotherapy.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
