Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Adolescents with Depression: A Treatment Manual

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Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) is a manualised, time-limited model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy comprising twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers, designed so that it can be delivered within a public mental health system, such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the UK.

It has its origins in psychoanalytic theoretical principles, clinical experience, and empirical research suggesting that psychoanalytic treatment of this duration can be effective for a range of disorders, including depression, in children and young people. The manual explicitly focuses on the treatment of moderate to severe depression, both by detailing the psychoanalytic understanding of depression in young people and through careful consideration of clinical work with this group. It is the first treatment manual to describe psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adolescents with depression.

The treatment approach described in this manual has been used in a multi-site randomised controlled trial in the UK, ‘Improving Mood with Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Therapies’ (IMPACT) and internationally. It is presented here as a treatment to be used in routine clinical practice and will be of interest to child psychotherapists, multi-disciplinary professionals in young people’s mental health, service providers, and researchers alike.

After describing theoretical models of depression and presenting an overview of STPP as a treatment model, the manual details the specific stages of the STPP process for the therapist and adolescent patient. It then describes the nature and scope of parallel work with parents and gives a detailed account of the function of supervision.