Klerman and Weissman have adapted IPT for routine use in medical settings, employing existing personnel who may not necessarily have mental health training, and treating patients with milder depressive symptoms. To differentiate it from IPT and suggest a lower level of interventions and severity of patients' symptoms, this treatment is called interpersonal counseling (IPC).
IPC is a brief treatment of six fifteen-to twenty-minute sessions, with the initial session being longer. Focused on the patient's current psychosocial functioning, IPC is administered by a health-care professional, without special training in mental health treatment. It is designed for nonpsychiatric patients who are in distress, have symptoms related to current stresses in their lives, but do not have serious concurrent psychiatric disorders or medical conditions. The therapist attends to recent changes in the person's life: events; sources of stress in the family, home, workplace, and friendship patterns; and ongoing difficulties in interpersonal relations. In IPC, it is assumed that such events provide the interpersonal context in which physical and emotional symptoms related to distress, anxiety, and depression occur. Although designed for use in primary-care facilities, IPC may suit other medical settings.
IPC is briefer than IPT in number and duration of sessions. To facilitate use by professionals outside the field of mental health, actual scripts for each session are outlined, and homework has been added to accelerate the process. While offered six sessions in the initial contract, patients are not encouraged to use all six sessions if they can work out the presenting problem or feel sufficiently improved with fewer. IPC is described in a chapter in Weissman MM, Markowitz J, Klerman GL, Comprehensive Guide to Interpersonal Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 2000 (available through www.amazon.com).