In the United-States, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg created the Brief Family Therapy center of Milwaukee in 1978 and proposed a different approach from the "classical" brief therapy approach. Their solution-oriented therapy, similar to that of another American therapist, Bill O'Hanlon, aims at fostering change by leveraging the exceptions to the patient's problem.
In Italy, Giorgio Nardone and Paul Watzlawick created the Strategic Therapy Center in Arezzo in 1987. Nardone's work aims at establishing a dialogue with "traditional" psychiatry by demonstrating how brief therapy can be applied to specific problems: phobias, eating disorders...
In French-speaking Europe, the MRI official representative is the Institut Gregory Bateson, founded in 1987 by Jean-Jacques Wittezaele et Teresa Garcia. IGB's work contributed a lot to making the brief therapy approach known in Belgium and in France. One of their main contributions was the development of an intervention protocol for situations of "forced help", for example when a family is forced to consult a therapist by a court decision.
