These are three very similar processes. What differentiates them is the objectivethat arises in each one of them.

Psychotherapy is a path in which the objective is to accompany and support the person in a process of changing his way of understanding things, reading his own behaviour and reality around him, managing emotions and reactions, reconsidering goals and strategies, to reach a state of greater well-being and/or better balance. All this process starts from an analysis of past and present experiences.

Psychological support is aimed at overcoming specific periods of life (adolescence, retirement, pregnancy and maternity, etc.) or of contingent situations that put the person in difficulty (separations, deaths, transfers, work problems, difficulties in managing children, etc.). It aims to provide elements for the understanding / interpretation of the specific problem, and to bring out or develop the most suitable skills and strategies to deal with them as effectively as possible.

The path of psychoeducation is a path of analysis and re-orientation of certain behaviours of the person, linked to one or more spheres of action and / or to one or more socio-relational areas. It aims to improve the abilities of understanding of the events and people around us and promoting a more adequate, functional and satisfactory behaviour in the areas initially identified as critical.

There can be very different reasons to undertake a psychotherapy path: if I’m living a negative emotional state, or if I’m not very satisfied with my life and my way to deal with daily life; if I have developed any symptoms, physical or mental, that create discomfort or tire me; if I’m going through critical moments, or moments of confusion, in which I feel the necessity to put in question values, goals, motivation, relationships; if I suffered a loss that I can’t overcome or if I went through a traumatic change.

Regardless of the reasons which might push me to start a psychotherapy cycle, a necessary starting points are a real motivation to change and the willingness to put myself in the game and to change the way I interpret the world and/or some behaviours which are part of my daily routine.

To achieve greater well-being it is much more effective to change myself than to try to change the world around me.

The necessity to have a better well-being, a better balance, to have my life under control, to relate in a more serene way with others and with the world, to be more serene and satisfied, push me to seek a positive and stable change.

When I feel this need, this urgency, and I’m willing to put myself out there, it’s time for a psychotherapy.

There is no defined time; because each person is unique, like his or her story.
Change can be a more or less slow (or fast) maturing process, which sometimes encounters stallings and sometimes accelerations, and which requires, once reached, to be consolidated with a stabilisation process.

Nonetheless, in psychotherapy as in other matters, it is crucial to set not only objectives, but also time limits. Otherwise – as Freud intended in his essay “Analysis terminable and interminable” (1937)-, we run the risk to fall in another routine, that of psychotherapy, which would come as a substitute to other kinds of dependence behaviours, preventing in this way a progressive autonomy of the person.

Though it’s not possible to set a predefined time limit, it is still important to share objectives and to set periodic deadlines to verify if the goals were met, whole or in part. It is necessary to verify whether the path is proceeding in a satisfactory direction for both (psychotherapist and client), and if not for what reason. And to verify whether the initial objectives are still valid or whether other more important targets have emerged or intermediate targets have been identified.

Psychotherapy ends when both the client and the psychotherapist “agree that they have achieved each from his own point of view, the goals set”. For the client personal psychological well-being. For the therapist the achievement of a condition of stability of the patient, that prevents them from the “falling again into the pathological patterns in question” (ibidem) and allows them to face the challenges ahead in an autonomous and positive way.

A good psychotherapy is not exclusively evaluable by how well I feel when I finish each session.
In such a complicated process sometimes we feel good, we feel heard, full of energy, but there are other times in which we feel frustrated demoralized, annihilated, threatened.

It’s important to have the perception of being understood and welcomed for who we are. The first step to psychotherapy is in fact learning to accept ourselves as we are, even if we don’t get to like ourselves or we don’t feel up to the task. It is necessary therefore, that the psychotherapist welcomes us as we are and makes us feel comfortable, and not wrong or inappropriate.

Being welcomed and heard does not mean being pitied: it is therefore crucial to find in the psychotherapist a figure who welcomes us as we are but also encourages us to improve. Who helps us rise from within us our capabilities, resources and skills. The psychotherapist accompanies us in a new interpretation of ourselves, and has to provide us with another observation point, an external point of view which allows to get of the black and white dualisms and rituals to which we are used.

A good psychotherapy helps me to find a better self and does not pretend to turn me into someone else.

A good psychotherapy is efficient when change, which is produced, allowed me to feel comfortable in my own skin. It helps me also to build a good lifestyle, to be less enslaved by guilt, sense of duty, or people’s opinion, and to be more conscious of the consequences to my choices. A good psychotherapy will gradually make me find solutions to issues for which I chose to start psychotherapy in the first place. Furthermore, it will allow me to develop suited strategies and deal with new issues, which might come up in the future, autonomously.

A good psychotherapy will help me to understand myself better, to accept and manage my boundaries, to better understand the link between my behaviour and other people’s, to develop a good capability to read and orientate myself in the context in which I live.

A psycho-diagnostic evaluation is a clinical evaluation made by the psychotherapist or psychiatrist in a set number of sessions, upon request by the person interested -if minor or with diminished responsibility, at the request of their legal guardian.

A certificate is generally issued, more or less detailed according to the need of the person who requests it and the evaluation of the specialist. The wording “It is released upon the request of the interested party for purposes designated by the law” is usually applied at the bottom, as the evaluation always contains a certain amount of sensitive data. The data owner must therefore be made aware that the dissemination of the contents of the evaluation in contexts that are not appropriate, could make this data public.

A psycho-diagnostic evaluation can include one, more or all of the following components, depending on the explicit objective for which it is requested:

1. Remote medical history (short description of the events that produced the current situation and list of previous symptoms or psychological problems);
2. Current medical history (narrative description of the current situation);
3. Functional evaluation;
4. Structural assessment;
5. Diagnosis (according to collectively shared parameters);
6. Prognosis;
7. Behavioural, therapeutic and pharmacological indications.

Before the drafting of the diagnostic evaluation it is important that the psychotherapist and the client clearly share the objectives and the purposes for which the evaluation is requested and the possible implications in its disclosure.

An expertise is said to be in fact a psycho-diagnostic evaluation which is required to be filed in an administrative or legal path in which it can become public. It can be requested by the interested party, or by a parent or guardian, but it is often requested by a public body (court, social service, criminal observation services, etc.), or by the opposing party in a legal case. It is often supported by the administration of tests, and in general, it must be shared with experts of the adverse party or with judges and public offices. It is a generally very detailed evaluation, which must answer a specific question (parenting capacity, compos mentis, presence of mental suffering in situations of extreme and unmotivated stress in the workplace or family, etc.). It generally covers all the 7 parts above plus the answer to the specific question for which it was requested and, if necessary, the reference bibliography.

The psycho-diagnostic expertise, can be “court-appointed”, when requested by a court or a public office, and the expert answers directly to the requesting body; or “independent” and the expert answers to the party in question or to the opposing party, maintaining as focal parameters the dictates of professional ethics and of their own professional order.

Often on the same situation, more than one expert is involved. They evaluate the same events (and the results of the interviews and tests) with the aim of highlighting -starting from the empirical data- the favourable elements for their own party.

The preparation of an appraisal is a process that requires more time and effort than a simple evaluation required for personal use, depending on the attention given to it, and it is often a tiring process even for the client, with whom it is necessary to share objectives and possible outcomes of the appraisal before starting work.