Handling Treatment Failure Successfully: The Case of the Hypochondriacal Attorney
Persons, J. B., & Mikami, A. Y. (2002). Strategies for handling treatment failure successfully. Psychotherapy: Theory/Research/PracticeTraining, 39, 139-151.
This paper addresses the topic of treatment failure in psychotherapy. We present some data supporting our assertions that failure is common, that it is rarely discussed, and that clinicians do not handle it well. We describe a hypothesis-testing mode of clinical work that provides a useful conceptual framework for handling treatment failure, and we use the framework to develop an algorithm for handling treatment failure.