Medical and psychological model of psychotherapy. Lecturer — Timofeeva-Gerasimova K.V.
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Medical and psychological care have different standards.
Within the framework of medical standards, care is provided to the sick, the patient, as prescribed by the doctor. The obligation of the patient to visit a doctor, undergo an examination and perform the procedures prescribed for him. If the patient performed the prescribed procedures, the doctor is responsible for the results of the treatment.
Clinical psychotherapy works strictly within the framework of the standards of medical care. As a medical specialty, it works within the framework of the concepts of «patient», «diagnosis», «clinic», «nosology», «pathology mechanisms», «treatment», «efficacy», «prognosis», further «medical history», «legal responsibility for the patient”, etc.
The standards of psychological assistance are different, more democratic and less directive. There are no obligatory directions and prescriptions here, just as there are no “doctor-patient” relationships. There is a “client” here, a free person who can turn to a psychotherapist with a request for help, with a request for patronage, and stop communicating with a psychotherapist when he also considers it necessary. The position of the client is active: “I decide whether I need psychotherapy or not, what to do and what does not suit me,” but in this case, the responsibility for the results of psychotherapy lies equally with the psychotherapist and the client. Relationships are equal.
Within the framework of medical standards, the task of a doctor is to save a person from suffering. If a doctor starts doing something else, he is no longer a doctor. The standards of psychological care allow the psychotherapist to engage in any helping topic, such as improving the client’s family relationships or his personal growth.
Clinical psychotherapy can only be practiced by a doctor with a medical education. A specialist practicing psychological psychotherapy must have a psychological education.
However, humanitarian psychotherapy does not shackle itself with such educational obligations and believes that any person, even without special education, has the right to help other people if it suits both parties.
Most non-medical psychotherapy exists in the space of a humanitarian approach, or more precisely, lives in the space of fairy tales, metaphors and direct suggestions. A client comes to a psychotherapist with problems that he created for himself, in his reality. The psychotherapist, in response to this, offers him a different reality, a new fairy tale with other entities, for persuasiveness creates a new problem there (with which he knows how to work better), solves this problem and by this fact convinces the client that now his problem is gone. The good storyteller supplanted the bad storyteller, and there was neither science nor logic in this work. It was the art of suggestion.