One-person family therapy: a modality of brief strategic family therapy.

The One-Person Family Therapy approach to the treatment of drug abuse described here is based on the Brief Strategic Family Therapy conceptual framework. It represents an innovative integration of family therapy techniques that have proven effective in working with entire families and techniques specifically designed for use with one family member. OPFT appears to be as effective as conjoint family therapy with adolescent drug abusers and their families. It thus provides skilled family therapists (generally master's-level social workers and psychologists with training and experience in structural family therapy) with a novel and useful tool for carrying out family therapy, while minimizing the problem of retaining entire families in therapy. Further work should concentrate on improving our ability to engage families of drug-abusing adolescents in the therapy process, generalizing results to other types of samples, learning more about using an OP who is not also the identified patient, exploring the possibility of switching OPs, exploring the use of spaced followup therapy, and integrating OPFT and CFT sessions more fully. However, it is clear that OPFT is a practical, cost-effective, field-oriented intervention for use with drug-abusing adolescents.