[A model for ambulatory long-term treatment of chronic psychiatric patients].

Psychiatric aftercare clinics aim at longterm maintenance in the community of such patients who in the past used to be confined to inpatient facilities. Specific factors of the clinic setting, adaptive psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy complement each other. The concept of the therapeutic team approach and the implied development of institutional transference phenomena create the framework for the strategic model of adaptively oriented psychotherapy. Only the precise understanding of psychodynamic conditions in a given patient's predicament permits the therapist to arrive at the empathic contact that underlies the supportive and cautiously modifying psychotherapy that is practiced here. The concept of alternative therapy, namely either verbal or pharmacological approach, has given way to the principle of complementary pharmacological intervention: According to the current presentation and needs of a patient, the use of psychotropic agents is each time titrated against the psychotherapeutic mode.