Abstract:

There were times when adult education and psychotherapy were equally related as medical care and psychotherapy.
It is shown that this was not only the case for the time of the first occidental professional educator of adults - i..e. the first one who proclaimed special goals and methods for the education of adults and who earned his living on this educational practice - Protagoras, nearly 2500 years ago, but also for the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, when transdiagnostic psychotherapy flourished in the early forms of behavioral therapies following Skinner, cognitive therapies following Ellis, and person-centered therapies following Rogers. In the following decades psychotherapy became increasingly dominated by - often manualized - disorder-focused approaches and by approaches of a cognitive behavioural orientation. Only in the last decade there began to grow a dissatisfaction inside this, hence most successful orientation of disorder-focused psychotherapy, due mainly to studies showing high lifetime comorbidity across psychological disorders (Harvey, et al. 2004, p.11) and because " A striking trend to emerge from the disorder-focused research is the marked similarity in the cognitive behavioural processes identfied as important across the different psychological disorders." (Harvey, etal. 2004, p.1).

But more important for the renewed interest in transdiagnostic psychotherapy and related adult psycho-education in the last decade is the rise in the economical damage done by the increasing numbers of psychological and psychosomatic disturbances in the developped countries, which makes clear that there will never be enough affordable psychotherapists to meet this challenge, if one sticks exclusively to the disorder-focused curative forms of psychotherapy instead of reviving transdiagnostic psychotherapies with their greater potential of related preventive psycho-education.

At the moment promising approaches for such adult psycho-education and transdiagnostic psychotherapy seem to be: a) approaches dealing with the improvement of emotion regulation, b) approaches promoting psychological flexibility and mindfulness, c) approaches dealing with complex problem-solving and stress management, d) approaches using sound metacognitive strategies, e) approaches fostering stress resilience. It will be shown, exemplarily, how combinations of these five ways of adult psych-education and transdiagnostic psychotherapy can be organized (Scholz, 2005, 2010) and it will be proposed that the impact of such psycho-education can be enhanced by working in multi-professional teams and by adapting a method of Protagoras for his psycho-education towards wisdom in the Athenian democracy to the possibilities of our time.

References:
Harvey, A., Watkins, E., Mansell, W. & Shafran, R. (2004). Cognitive behavioral processes across psychological disorders. A transdiagnostic approach to research and treatment. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Scholz, W.-U. (2005). Akzeptieren und verändern als Prinzip multimodaler Stresskompetenz, Entspannungsverfahren, 22, 21-57
Scholz, W.-U. (2010). Cre-active behaviour therapy for stress resilience, Psicoterapia Cognitiva e Comportamentale, 16 (3), 513.

Keywords:

Psycho-education, transdiagnostic psychotherapy, stress resilience.