Fools Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread

Abstract

This chapter builds on others and proposes that stabilization ought to be the first imperative in psychotherapy and a primary focus of all encounters with mental health services. Readers are invited to reframe treatment resistance, treatment failure, and ‘dropouts' from therapeutic programmes as largely a failure achieve stabilization prior to or in the early phases of psychotherapy. This entails the provision of basic human needs, safety, and facilitating a sense of safety within the psychotherapeutic relationship.