Human Systems Therapy Techniques For Managing Aggressive Behavior In Psychiatric Services

摘要

The aim of this paper is to present certain Human Systems Therapy techniques, which have been successfully applied in managing aggressive behavior in psychiatric services. The main characteristics that differentiate Human Systems Therapy from other Systemic methods are the following: a) it is applicable on a family as well as on an individual level (multilevel); b) it includes techniques that address patient's emotions and hence, it is applicable to psychotics and mentally retarded people; and c) it involves a third order cybernetics' epistemology, which allows the use of knowledge steming from psychological and family studies for formulating hypotheses useful to therapy. The subjects of the current study were psychotics and mentally retarded adults. The techniques are the following: over/positive description, alchemy of behavior, changing emotional context in the ecology of mind, freedom of choice and expected consequences. The four techniques share a paradoxical element in the sense that the therapist is not confronting patient's aggressive behavior in order to suppress it. On the contrary, the therapist acts as if the patient is not being aggressive. These techniques have been used for the last six years in psychiatric services, where they promoted complete avoidance of restraint. Besides, these techniques possibly contributed to shorten the hospitalization time of aggressive psychotics, and to improve significantly the personal abilities of profound mentally retarded adults. It is worthwhile both to further use these techniques as well as to test their effectiveness in research trials.