Treatment Resistance and Patient Authority: The Austen Riggs Reader.

4.22.2011

Treatment Resistance and Patient Authority:  The Austen Riggs Reader

W. W. Norton announces the June 20 publication of an invaluable resource for both understanding treatment resistance and implementing practical and effective techniques to treat it in clinical practice: Treatment Resistance and Patient Authority: The Austen Riggs Reader.  The book is available now through Norton.

Austen Riggs recognizes and emphasizes the authority and responsibility of the patient in treatment by offering enduring treatment relationships over time, and by focusing on the meaning of symptoms, behavior, and treatment resistance itself. 

Edited by Eric M. Plakun, M.D., director of admissions and professional relations, Treatment Resistance and Patient Authority… includes 14 chapters written by Riggs medical staff members.   In addition to several chapters on individual therapy approaches, the book includes the first description published in book form of the newly-defined area of psychodynamic psychopharmacology—an approach to the use of medications that attends to the meaning of medications to the patient and clinician, as well as to their pharmacologic effects.

Other chapters describe a psychodynamic systems perspective with treatment resistant disorders, with illustrations of the value of including family therapy, developing and using a psychodynamic treatment team, and using a therapeutic milieu to optimize outcomes in work with treatment resistant patients. Important clinical problems such as trauma, psychosis, suicide, family resistance, integrated treatment, and psychopharmacologic failures are covered in detail. Throughout, practical principles are reported to help the reader apply learning from Riggs to other outpatient, residential, day treatment, and inpatient settings.

“This wonderful book, replete with clinical case examples, reminds us to take a deeper look into the minds of our patients....This book is long overdue and will enhance the reader’s clinical practice.”—Daniel Carlat, M.D., publisher, The Carlat Psychiatry Report and author, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry.

 “…Riggs has been able to continue and transcend the tradition of the psychodynamic hospital with the incorporation of new knowledge regarding groups and organizations and the interrelationship between psycho-pharmacological, psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral and supportive approaches. This represents, I believe, a new psychiatry that, hopefully, will again integrate body and mind, neurobiological, psychodynamic and social dynamic knowledge and approaches."