[Motivational Interviewing in Psychiatry]

Motivational Interviewing and associated communication techniques and intervention methods have been widely applied in patients with substance use disorder and other psychiatric disorders in the last twenty years. Intensive research on effectiveness and underlying mechanisms as well as the increasing efforts to apply MI in other psychiatric disorders has lead to a large number of scientific publications in this field. MI has been shown to be effective in situations where the patient's ambivalence seems to impede the therapeutic process. Communication skills and the ability of the care taker to induce the so called "change talk" by the patient play a particularly important role and correlate with the positive effects of MI. Those groups of patients in which other factors than ambivalence affect the therapeutic process seem to benefit much less from this intervention method. MI hallmarks the substantial change that gradually took place during the last two decades in caretakers' attitude towards patients with dependence and other psychiatric patients: away from "prescriptive" towards "supportive" treatment and communication style. Therefore, it seems to be reasonable to implement the basics of MG in the training curricula for psychiatrists.