To give our readers a better sense of what an effective mental health treatment plan looks like, I have been recreating a treatment plan here through a series of blog posts. To see other posts in this series, please click here.
If your therapist is the GPS, you are the driver. Ultimately, you have control over where you are going emotionally.*
Therefore, outlining courses of action that you will take is as vital to your success as are your therapist’s courses of action, which we discussed in our blog post Your Therapist’s “To Do” List. The next section of the mental health treatment plan I use is called the Patient’s Objectives—in a nutshell, your own “to do” list. These objectives are the actual courses of action you will take to help you reach your goals. They will usually be a reflection of your therapist’s objectives.
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TPG
7:45 pm on
February 16th, 2010This continues to be one of the most informative nuts-and-blogs blogs on Psychcentral. What percentage of therapists whom you’ve trained actually do treatment plans this detailed, after they’ve been in practice for a while?
When you get to the section on Check-ins and assessments, can you please talk about benchmarks for measuring progress? Also, what happens if these benchmarks are not reached? At what point does the therapist say, “I wonder if I’m the best person for you. Maybe you should see XXX.” And make the referral. How devastating is that to most clients?
Thanks for your comments–they are much appreciated.In fact, they really help us focus on what we should be writing about.
In answer to your first question, I can say that the therapists who work in clinics are still using the treatment plan format that I and/or other administrators put in place (it is important to remember that there are many different variations of the treatment plan–my particular format works for me but many other formats are equally effective). However, unlike with patients, unless therapists in private practice contact me, I have no way of knowing if they are still following through on using the treatment plan.
We are in the initial stages of developing a training program that addresses some of these issues.
What initially inspired me to write my book was hearing from patients and their families that they weren’t being given treatment plans.
We will attempt to answer your questions when we get to the next post, Target Dates for Check Ins. But I do want to assure you that if a therapist believes he or she does not have the resources or training to adequately help a patient and refers that patient to a professional or program who can do a better job, if the reasons are articulated clearly and are done with sensitivity my opinion is that the patient will be appreciative. It must be stressed that this is not a rejection of the patient.
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