Interpersonal Psychotherapy - Definition And Basics

People who have familiarized themselves enough with the different branches of psychotherapy will tell you that there are three major schools, or modalities, of psychotherapy – psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral and humanistic-existential psychotherapy.
What if I was to tell you that there is a type of psychotherapy that combines the essence of psychodynamic therapy with the working process of cognitive-behavioral therapy ? Such a therapy not only exists, but has proven its efficiency in several spheres where other sorts of therapy tend not to work that well. The particular sort of psychotherapy (or effektive psykoterapi københavn as we say in Denmark) we are talking about is interpersonal therapy.
Let’s do a short review of what the main things that interpersonal therapy stands for are. Interpersonal therapy roots itself in the idea that most of the problems that a person experiences are caused by his relationship with others, and as the name suggests – interpersonal connections are the most vital factor to be considered when taking care of the patient.
The historical roots of interpersonal therapy are thought to be found first in the works of Harry Sullivan, who was essentially a supporter of psychodynamic therapy, but was later influenced by his interest in sociology to believe that the person’s surrounding environment of people was most crucial.
With this name, interpersonal therapy first started as a placebo technique, developed by American psychotherapist Gerald Klerman , but later became a separate therapy , due to its almost unexplainable efficiency with treating particular problems.
Speaking of the problems that are best treated by interpersonal therapy, they are several and are almost always in the field of mood disorders. Starting with bipolar disorder, which is a condition in which the person exhibits violent mood swings that range from mania to depression. We continue with conditions like bulimia nervosa, which is largely a mental disorder that becomes an eating disorder. We can go on from here to reach conditions like post-partum depression , which happens when a mother who has just given childbirth, experiences severe depression, whether that is because of hormonal change or just a swing in the behavioral pattern.
Another condition that is treated with interpersonal therapy better than with any other therapy is called cyclothymia , in which the patient exhibits symptoms similar to those of a bipolar disorder, though more subtle and harder to detect, but still very dangerous to the overall mental health of the person in question, which can lead to things as severe as unexpected suicide attempts.
Interpersonal therapy manages to deal with a lot of the patient’s issues by carefully picking the factors that are defining to the person’s mental health, and attempting to deal with them in the way that cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is known to use – through homework assignments, setting clear goals and using a rather short time frame to manage to do all of that. In a way, interpersonal psychotherapy manages to filter out all of the positive and useful things out of psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapies, in order to leave a person with an option for better treatment.