Forms of Brief Therapy: Edited by Simon H. Budman. New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1981. 482 pp.

This volume, which grew out of the Harvard Community Health Plan Conference on brief therapy in 1979, is composed of a collection of papers representing the work of various clinicians and researchers in the field of the brief therapies. I deliberately use the plural because, rather than focusing on any one form of brief therapy, the book covers a multitude of approaches. These range from analytically oriented individual therapy (in itself including various and contrasting theoretical and technical approaches) to behavioral, marital, and group therapies. The general tenor of the book is one of rather impressive optimism that the short-term therapies either now or in the near future will meet the pressing needs of the large majority of psychiatric patients, both in terms of clinical improvement—or even cure—and cost effectiveness.

Herbert Pardes, Director of NIMH and a psychoanalyst, and Harold Pincus offer an overview of the way in which brief therapy relates to national mental health issues. They stress the nation's great unmet need for mental health services, the difficulties certain segments of the population have experienced in utilizing available services, the increasing concerns about burgeoning costs to government and other third-party payers, and the historical aspects of the growth of community mental health centers and health maintenance organizations as providers of psychiatric care. They believe that within a context of appropriate technological advance, particularly with emphasis on specificity and differentiation of intervention modalities and accurate assessment of treatment results, brief therapy promises to promote wider and better care for a wide variety of psychiatric patients. Indeed, a recurring theme expressed by many of the authors in this book is the need for proper attention to the patient-therapist fit and for specificity of treatment techniques tailored to the particular problems with which patients present themselves.