From Psychiatric Interviews to Psychotherapies

Psychotherapy can be defined as a treatment method consisting of psychological tools whereby a trained expert works with a person or a group to resolve the patient’s biopsychosocial problems through relation and communication. There are numerous issues in psychotherapy practice that require further efforts to ground relevant concepts. Most psychiatrists’ practices have shifted towards offering psychopharmacological treatment alone for a number of reasons, such as increasing patient volume, recent pharmacological developments, protocols on drug therapies, time restriction on doctors and so on. At the same time, it is important to know why people turn to psychiatry, what makes them benefit from psychiatric services, and why they have chosen psychiatry over other fields in medicine. The answers to these questions bring us to a place and value of psychotherapies in the curriculum of psychiatric training. In all kinds of psychiatric practices, the leading treatment factor is the doctor-patient relationship, which should be formed within the transference/countertransference framework. What deems psychiatry different and more attractive than other fields of medicine are these skills, which can be collectively referred to as “psychotherapeutic intervention”. The psychiatry resident should be equipped with several skills and knowledge on psychiatric interviews during their psychotherapy education in order to employ a successful psychotherapeutic intervention. This paper aims to create a look into how psychotherapies and psychotherapeutic intervention should be understood and placed within current practices. [1,2]. This definition is in accordance with and a result of the “biopsychosocial (BPS) model,” a comprehensive approach that has been founded on the principle of giving equal importance to biological, psychological, and social factors in all matters relating to health [3,4]. The BPS model considers the patient’s personal and family history, physical and subjective experiences, and societal characteristics in diagnosis and treatment [3,57]. In this sense, psychotherapy can be defined as an effort to resolve the patient’s biopsychosocial problems through relation and communication [3,7]. Even though it has been easy to agree on a definition, the panorama of the psychotherapeutic field reflects numerous issues in practice and requires further efforts to ground relevant concepts. By these concepts, we mean the contradictory situation between the rigid approach we see when we look at dimensions that do not match the definition of psychotherapy and its place in practice (such as fanatical psychotherapy schools, education and certification processes) rather than known problems in the field of psychotherapy [1,8]. As long as we cannot resolve this contradiction, no matter how flexible we define it, in the final analysis, psychotherapy turns into a viable treatment modality only after receiving training and certification from an institution that works only under a certain school, within the framework of the common understanding. This paper aims to create a look into the use of psychotherapies within the current psychiatric and medical notions and seek to emphasize that a new concept such as “psychotherapeutic intervention” is needed to overcome the contradiction mentioned above or that this concept needs to be revived and its REviEw ARticlE