The guidelines have been developed for the Division of Clinical Psychology to promote best practice in psychological formulation, which is a core competence for clinical psychologists.

Comparative accounts of the psychotherapies can provide brief portraits that don't convey what their relative strengths and weaknesses are. Both experienced and novice clinicians will be able to enhance their clinical skills and theoretical knowledge. Put simply, case formulation is one method of a client and therapist coming to shared understanding of a difficulty. It introduces the reader to the theory and practice of formulation through the discussion of two clients (one adult and one child focused problem), whose problems are formulated from the perspective of 5 different therapeutic traditions: systemic, psychodynamic, community, cognitive- behavioural and social constructionist/narrative. It looks at the growing trend for formulations that draw on two or more therapeutic models and includes two chapters dealing with integrative formulation.The structure of negative emotional states: comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories. It demonstrates the richness of ideas which psychologists and therapists contribute to their understanding of clients' problems as well as confronting the complex issues arising from the idea of formulation itself. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.

Books like this one reemphasize the necessity of grounding clinical practice in clear articulations of theory and rich descriptions of clinets' lives and experiences. In covering a variety of perspectives – not only cognitive–behavioural, psychodynamic, systemic and integrative, but also social inequalities and social constructivist viewpoints – each psychologist contributor has been asked to produce specimen formulations for two case vignettes: a young man expressing paranoid fears and an anxious 9-year-old girl with developmental problems (although some pass on the latter). Formulation in Psychology and Psychotherapy places this growing interest in formulation in a clinical and historical context.As far as I could tell, amid repeated references to ‘problems’ and ‘distress’ as the basis of client's suffering, the word ‘illness’ fails to appear. Often, little attention is paid to how a formulation would be used to facilitate treatment within a particular model, in favour of its purely descriptive functions. The first edition of Formulation in Psychology and Psychotherapy caught the wave of growing interest in formulation in a clinical context. A case formulation (case conceptualisation) can be thought of as any way of helping a client to understand what their difficulties are, where they originated, and what keeps them going.