Treatment of Psychological Disorders

1. Treatment of Psychological Disorders

2. History of Treatment • We have treated mental illnesses with variety of harsh and gentle methods: • Cutting holes in heads, by giving warm baths and massages; by restraining, bleeding or “beating the devil” out of people and by placing them in sunny, serene environments; by administering drugs and electric shocks and by talking-talking about childhood experiences; about current feelings about maladaptive thoughts and behaviors • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PWUXKKvLM

3. Treatment of Psychological Disorders • Gentler treatments occurred thanks to efforts of : • Philippe Pinel (France) • Dorothea Dix (US, Canada, Scotland) • Mental Health Therapies can be classified into two main categories: • Psychotherapy • Biomedical Therapy

4. Treatment of Psychological Disorders • Psychotherapy: • Trained therapist uses psychological techniques to assist someone seeking to overcome difficulties or achieve personal growth • Biomedical Therapy: • A prescribed medication or medical procedure that acts directly on the patient’s nervous system

5. Eclectic Approach • An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy

6. Psychological Therapies • Psychoanalysis: • Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences-and the therapist’s interpretations of them-released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight • Few clinicians today practice therapy as Freud did, but some of his techniques and assumptions survive

7. Aims • Freud assumed that many psychological problems are fueled by childhood’s residue of repressed impulses and conflicts, he and his students sought to bring these repressed feelings into patients’ conscious awareness

8. Methods • Psychoanalysis is historical construction • Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the formative power of childhood experiences • Free association: • Freud • Relax, perhaps by lying on a couch • To help you focus on your thoughts and feelings, the psychoanalyst may sit out of line of vision • You say whatever comes to mind

9. Methods • Free Associations: • May sound easy but often we filter what we say for fear, shame or guilt (may laugh it off, change subject) • Blocks • In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material

10. Methods • Interpretation: • In psychoanalysis, the analyst’s noting supposed dream meaning, resistances, and other significant behavior and events in order to promote insight • Freud: Latent Content

11. Methods • You may find yourself experiencing strong positive or negative feelings for your analyst • Transferring: • In psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent)

12. Critics of Freudian Analysis The therapist is seeming to dig into the unconscious, which is supposedly full of locked, painful childhood memories. Critics say therapists can actually create such memories in clients, leading them to believe that they have experienced repressed childhood trauma

13. Psychodynamic Therapy • Influenced by Freud, psychodynamic therapists try to understand a patient’s current symptoms by focusing on themes across important relationships, including childhood experiences and the therapist relationship

14. Humanistic Therapies • The humanistic perspective has emphasized people’s inherent potential for self-fulfillment • Aims to boost self-fulfillment by helping people grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance • Psychoanalytic and humanistic therapies are often referred to as insight therapies

15. Humanistic therapists differ from psychoanalysts • Humanistic therapists focus on: • The present and future more than the past. They explore feelings as they occur, rather than achieving insights into the childhood origins of the feelings • Conscious rather than unconscious thoughts • Taking immediate responsibility for one’s feelings and actions, rather than uncovering hidden determinants • Promoting growth instead of curing illness. Thus, those in therapy became “clients” rather than “patients” (a change many therapists have since adopted)

16. Client-Centered Therapy • Carl Rogers (1902-1987): • Developed the widely used humanistic technique he called client-centered therapy • Uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients growth (Also called person-centered therapy)

17. Active Listening • Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy • Accepted in many high schools, colleges and clinics

18. Unconditional Positive Regard • A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance

19. Behavior Therapies • Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors

20. Classical Conditioning Techniques • Developed in Ivan Pavlov’s early twentieth-century conditioning experiments • Various behaviors and emotions are learned through classical conditioning

21. Counterconditioning • A behavior therapy procedure that uses classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; includes exposure therapies and aversive conditioning

22. Exposure Therapies • Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actuality) to the things they fear and avoid

23. Systematic Desensitization • A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

24. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy • An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders or public speaking

25. Aversive Conditioning • A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

26. Operant Conditioning • Voluntary behaviors are strongly influenced by their consequences. Knowing this, behavior therapists can practice behavior modification-reinforcing desired behaviors, and withholding reinforcement or enacting punishment for undesired behaviors

27. Token Economy An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats

28. Cognitive Therapies • Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions

29. Cognitive-Behavior Therapy • A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior)

30. Family Therapy • Therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by; or directed at, other family members

31. Write about it: • Critics say that behavior modification techniques, such as those used in token economies, are inhumane. Do you agree or disagree? Why? • What is the major distinction between the underlying assumptions in insight therapies and in behavior therapies?