Spouse-Aided Therapy in Psychiatry: An Introduction

Abstract

This paper underlines the failure of contemporary individual and marital psychotherapies to help many married people with persisting psychological disorders. It examines the spouse's contribution to the maintenance of psychological disability, and discusses the problems of constructively involving such spouses in conjoint therapy. Spouse-aided therapy addresses this problem by inviting the patient's spouse to become a co-therapist. It is explicitly not a marriage therapy, and is conducted on a goal-orientated time-limited out-patient basis. During discussion of problems with achieving treatment goals, the focus of therapy shifts from the patient's symptoms to marital interaction. Confrontation of the spouse's contribution to the patient's continuing disability then becomes possible, and is followed by changes in marital interaction which generally facilitate the patient's improvement. Many couples choose to proceed with marital therapy after spouse-aided therapy has allowed them to reconstrue the patient's symptoms in interactional terms.