Book excerpt: Couples Therapy in Managed Care: Facing the Crisis provides social workers, psychologists, and counselors with an overview of the negative effects of the managed care industry on the quality of mental health care. Within this book, you will discover the paradoxes that occur with the mixing of business principals and service principles and find valuable suggestions on how you can creatively cope within the managed care context. With Couples Therapy in Managed Care, you will learn how you can remain true to your own integrity and offer quality services within the current context of today's health care system. Current and comprehensive, Couples Therapy in Managed Care will assist you in easing the dilemma of patients who are suffering from serious physical illness or emotional pain and have little choice or time to search for a needed doctor or service. Couples Therapy in Managed Care offers you informative tips and suggestions on how you can help your clients within the constraints of the managed care system, such as: exploring ways to hold true to your personal values and the integrity of your personal approach to therapy while developing creative strategies to survive within managed care understanding the need to write a treatment plan using high professional standards and a solid theoretical analysis of the proposed therapy to give you a better chance of getting the managed care case manager to authorize your treatments realizing that maintaining a good working relationship with individual case managers will help you get more of your proposed treatments authorized, although their high rate of turnover makes this a daunting task discovering that a sometimes a solution to your problem may be as simple as a phone call to a case manager to negotiate an exception to a standard procedure Couples Therapy in Managed Care offers you effective suggestions to help you overcome the limitations you may encounter while trying to practice within a managed care setting. Innovative and informative, this book will help you provide your patients with the best possible therapy while offering you ways to decrease the stress that managed care systems can cause you and your clients.