Brief therapy is a postmodern treatment mode that treats problems as social constructions, encouraging those seeking treatment to replace personal troubles (negative stories) with new problem-solving skills (positive stories). The significant differences discussed in this book do not involve sociologists and brief therapists. The differences are between brief therapists, on the one hand, and practitioners of psychotherapy and family therapy on the other. One indicator of these is brief therapists' describing the people who seek their services as clients. The terminology may be contrasted with the language of patients used by many other therapists. At the very least, this difference suggests how brief therapy departs from therapy approaches that are based on the medical model