Working with the person with schizophrenia: the treatment alliance

The person with schizophrenia poses a formidable challenge even to the experienced clinician. Bizarre, unpredictable behavior, disordered thought patterns, peculiar, even unintelligible speech, and extreme distrust can drastically limit the clinician's ability to conduct therapy. It is often seemingly impossible to determine the cause of these behaviors: Are they a result of the disease, the side effects of drugs, or the patient's efforts to cope?

In this brilliant and insightful book, Dr. Michael Selzer and his colleagues offer a radical new perspective on understanding and treating the schizophrenic person. What is often lacking, they argue, is a clear understanding of the patient's own experience of his world. Without a realistic appraisal of the patient's physiological and psychological vulnerabilities, the effect of various stresses on him, and his own unique adaptation to these circumstances, no effective drug or psychotherapeutic treatment intervention is possible.

This thoughtful, intelligent, and acutely perceptive book is a major breakthrough for working with persons with schizophrenia. The authors have shown that therapy with the schizophrenic person is not only possible but highly rewarding.