A Study of the Process of Emergency Psychotherapy
THOMAS N. RUSK M.D.1, and
ROBERT H. GERNER 2
1 Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California at San Diego School of Medicine, La Jolla, Calif. 92037
2 Student at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center, Oklahoma City, Okla.
The authors studied the relationship between the amount of therapist talk time during crisis session interviews and the relief of distress in 38 emergency room patients. They found that in the sessions judged as successful the therapists talked significantly less in the first third of the interviews and significantly more in the last third and had larger increases in the amount of talk time from the first to the last third.
