Groups as a part of integrated treatment plans:Inpatient psychotherapy for outpatients?

Group psychotherapy in Germany is well established as part of an integrative treatment plan in inpatient treatment. Outpatient group psychotherapy, however, is conceptualized as a separate treatment option in competition with individual therapy. German guidelines for outpatient psychotherapy exclude concurrant group and individual therapy. Research favors studies on treatments in pure form. So publications on concurrant group and individual psychotherapy are mainly descriptive and published in english. This paper describes models of simultaneous group and individual psychotherapy with special reference to inpatient treatment and to the psychoanalytic-interactional group psychotherapy (a treatment modality within the Goettingen modell of group psychotherapy). Outpatient treatment with concurrant group and individual therapy at the Goettingen University Student Counselling Center is described. Discussion covers pre-treatment preparation of patients, different group settings, therapists' difficulties with concurrant treatment and indications for combinations of group and individual therapy. Evidence reported suggests for outpatient treatment the use of group psychotherapy not only as an alternative to individual therapy but also as concurrant therapy with groups and individual sessions as parts of an integrative treatment plan. Concurrant group and individual therapy offers some advantages of inpatient treatment in an outpatient setting.