Blueprints
Promising Programs
| Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) |
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Program Overview:
Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT)
adopts a structural family systems framework to improve
youth's behavior problems by improving family interactions
that are presumed to be directly related to the child's
symptoms.
Program Targets:
The target population in general are children and
adolescents between 8 and 17 years of age displaying
or at risk for developing behavior problems, including
substance abuse.
Program Content:
BSFT is a short-term, problem-focused intervention
with an emphasis on modifying maladaptive patterns
of interactions. Typical sessions last from 60 to
90 minutes, with 12-15 sessions over three months.
Therapy is based upon the assumption that each family
has unique characteristics that emerge when family
members interact, and that this family "system"
influences all members of the family, thus the family
is viewed as a whole organism. The repetitive interactions,
or ways in which family members interact and behave
with regard to one another can be either successful
or unsuccessful. BSFT targets these interaction patterns
that are directly related to the youth's behavior
problems and establishes a practical plan to help
the family develop more effective patterns of interaction.
The three primary components of the intervention
are:
- Joining: understanding resistance and engaging
the family in therapy;
- Diagnosis: identifying the interaction patterns
that encourage problematic youth behavior; and
- Restructuring: developing a specific plan to help
change maladaptive family interaction patterns by
working in the present, reframing, and working with
boundaries and alliances.
Program Outcomes:
BSFT adolescents showed significant reductions in
Conduct Disorder and Socialized Aggression from pre-
to post-treatment, while group therapy adolescents
showed no significant changes. There were also clinically
significant changes in Conduct Disorder and Socialized
Aggression favoring the treatment group over the control
group.
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