A Buddhist Framework for an Integrative Approach to Mental Health Counseling

An integrative approach to mental health counseling is becoming increasingly popular in the field. Mental health clinicians are encouraged to adopt an integrative approach, but they are left on their own to decipher how integration can best be achieved. This paper proposes that Buddhist psychology is particularly suited to be a framework from which a variety of Western psychological theories can be viewed in an integrative and holistic way. This paper examines three separate approaches to psychological integration - theoretical integration, the common factors approach and technical integration - and shows how each method of integration works together with the others to establish Buddhist psychology as a proposed framework for the creation of a psychological meta-theory. Theories of self, therapist offered common factors and the stages of change model are all utilized to help illustrate how an integrative meta-theory with both breadth and depth can be achieved using Buddhist psychology as a foundation.