Realistic approaches to counseling in the office setting

Although it is often unrecognized, family physicians provide a significant amount of mental health care in the United States. Time is one of the major obstacles to providing counseling in primary care. Counseling approaches developed specifically for ambulatory patients and traditional psychotherapies modified for primary care are efficient first-line treatments. For some clinical conditions, providing individualized feedback alone leads to improvement. The five A's (ask, advise, assess, assist, arrange) and FRAMES (feedback about personal risk, responsibility of patient, advice to change, menu of strategies, empathetic style, promote self-efficacy) techniques are stepwise protocols that are effective for smoking cessation and reducing excessive alcohol consumption. These models can be adapted to address other problems, such as treatment nonadherence. Although both approaches are helpful to patients who are ready to change, they are less likely to be successful in patients who are ambivalent or who have broader psychosocial problems. For patients who are less committed to changing health risk behavior or increasing healthy behavior, the stages-of-change approach and motivational interviewing address barriers. Patients with psychiatric conditions and acute psychosocial stressors will likely respond to problem-solving therapy or the BATHE (background, affect, troubles, handling, empathy) technique. Although brief primary care counseling has been effective, patients who do not fully respond to the initial intervention should receive multimodal therapy or be referred to a mental health professional.