Book excerpt: The Scope of Brief Therapy Within the last two decades there has been a dramatic expansion in the uses of short-term treatment (Grayson, 1979, Small, 1979). Brief therapies have been and continue to be widely used with a number of different patient popu lations in a broad variety of service settings. They have been reported in use with children, adolescents, adults~ and the aged; in groups, families, and individual treatment; on college campuses, high schools, in community mental health centers, in child guidance clinics, in private psychiatric clinics, in hospitals as part of out-patient or in-patient therapy, in programs of preventive community mental health; with the rich, the middle class, and the poor (Barten, 1971, 1972; Caplan, 1961, 1964; Small, 1979; Wolberg, 1965). Further, short term methods of therapy range across all of the major and well-known theoretical orientations found in the broader field of psychotherapy. There are some unique theoretical contributions which can be found within this field as well.