Supportive Psychotherapy

Supportive psychotherapy is the most widely practiced psychotherapeutic modality and has demonstrated clinical efficacy for many different patient types across a broad range of psychiatric disorders. The major change agent producing a positive outcome in supportive psychotherapy is the therapeutic alliance. The therapeutic alliance is established at the outset of psychotherapy and maintained throughout the treatment by the use of supportive interventions and empathic therapist comments. Supportive psychotherapy is a treatment that uses direct measures to reduce psychiatric symptoms. It does this by helping to improve self-esteem and adaptive skills. Important psychotherapeutic strategies include establishing and maintaining a strong therapeutic alliance, bolstering self-esteem, strengthening defenses, and the use of appropriate therapeutic disclosure and modeling. Interventional techniques include a more conversational empathic style of patient-therapist communication, acceptance, praise, reassurance, rationalizing, reframing, rehearsal, clarification, and confrontation. The focus is on the here-and-now, and real relationships, with less focus on transference issues.