I spent 9 years prior to Psilos on the leadership team of a managed healthcare company which provided mental health and substance abuse coverage and treatment to tens of millions of people.  The focus of our commercial practice, at least in the early days, was to connect people with highly effective but lower cost forms of interventions, with an emphasis on brief therapy.  At the time, brief therapy, an approach to one-on-one counseling where you focus on the immediate problems at hand and not on the long-term rooted causes (like how your parents didn’t love you enough), was a very new approach and was the subject of some controversy who weren’t familiar with that method of practice.

While no one at the firm thought it was funny in any way that people had stress-related or other psychological problems, we did used to joke about how fast we could get brief therapy to work.  If you really want to save money in a perfect world, you would figure out how to get people in and out in one session. Anyway, I came across this Bob Newhart clip about psychotherapy that reminded me of those days and made me laugh.  Who hasn’t wanted to give this therapeutic advice to others we know at one time or another?  If only it were so simple…..

Happy weekend!