4 th edition copyright 2004 - prentice hall13-1 therapy chapter 13

Copyright 2004 - Prentice Hall 13-1

4th Edition

Therapy

Chapter 13


Therapy Through The Ages

• Throughout history, prevailing views of the causes of psychological disorders have influenced treatments.

• Some people believed in "possession" by evil spirits, so they used treatments such as exorcism.

• The ancient Greeks proposed natural causes and treatments.



• Belief in demon possession was common during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

• Some accused witches may have suffered from psychological disorders.

• Asylums and hospitals did not always provide a humane refuge for afflicted people.



• Jean-Baptiste Pussin removed the chains from mental patients in France.

• Philippe Pinel and Benjamin Rush advocated kind treatment (moral therapy) of individuals with psychological disorders.



• Dorothea Dix spearheaded a movement that led to state operated custodial institutions.

• As state mental hospitals grew larger, however, their effectiveness declined.



• The community mental health movement recommended community-based treatment and emphasized prevention.



• Use of drugs coupled with growing awareness of the ineffectiveness of large institutions led to a policy of deinstitutionalization the release of patients from mental hospitals.



• About 30% of individuals with a psychological disorder seek treatment.

• Those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or panic disorder are more likely to seek treatment than individuals with substance-use disorders.



• There are two treatment categories for psychological disorders: biomedical and psychological therapies.

• Psychotherapy is a general term for psychological treatments designed to help people resolve behavioral, emotional, and Interpersonal problems.



• Among the licensed practitioners who provide therapy for psychological disorders are clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.


Psychologically Based Therapies

• Psychotherapy involves a special relationship between a distressed person and a therapist in which the therapist helps the client make changes in his or her thinking, feeling, and behavior.



• Psychoanalytic therapy aims to help the patient develop insight into unconscious feelings and conflicts by using free association, dream interpretation, and interpretation of resistance and transference.



• Humanistic therapies emphasize the ability of each person to solve his or her problems.

• Client-centered therapy seeks to develop an accepting environment for the client.

• Gestalt therapy helps clients develop self-acceptance, but Gestalt therapists are more directive than client-centered therapists.



• Cognitive therapies are designed to change the way the client thinks.

• Albert Ellis, the founder of rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT), assumes that people are disturbed by the way they Interpret events.



• Therefore, the role of the therapist is to challenge the client's irrational beliefs.



• Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy has been applied to depression with promising results.



• Behavior therapists view maladaptive behaviors as learned and rely on classical and operant conditioning and modeling to teach the client new behaviors.



• Systematic desensitization is an effective treatment for phobias in which clients are taught relaxation techniques and then asked to imagine or approach feared situations gradually.



• Modeling is also an effective treatment for phobias.

• Aversion therapy reduces undesirable behaviors by pairing them with an aversive (unpleasant) stimulus.



• Extinction is an operant conditioning technique used to reduce the occurrence of maladaptive behaviors.

• Reinforcers are withheld after the maladaptive behavior has occurred.



• Ethical and legal concerns restrict the use of punishment to cases in which a maladaptive behavior is highly resistant to other forms of therapy.



• Token economies are used to provide secondary reinforcement of desired behaviors.

• The tokens can be exchanged for primary reinforcers.



• Group therapy is based on the assumptions that behavior does not occur In a vacuum and that behaviors learned in group settings are more likely to generalize to everyday situations.

• Marital therapy and family therapy are two forms of group therapy.


The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy

• After Eysenck concluded that psychotherapy clients are just as likely to improve without it, psychotherapists sought to provide better information about the success of therapy.



• Meta-analysis allows researchers to combine the results of a number of studies.

• Using this technique, researchers have found that therapy does lead to greater improvement than no treatment and that differences among the various forms of therapy are not great.



• The search for the keys to successful therapy has led researchers to focus on factors such as the therapist's ability to communicate empathy, which can lead to improvement in distressed individuals.



• Therapists are becoming increasingly aware of the influence of ethnic and cultural factors on psychotherapy.

• Members of many ethnic groups drop out early from psychotherapy, in part because there is a dearth of therapists who share their native language as well as a failure to provide appropriate forms of therapy.



• The decision to enter psychotherapy should involve asking questions about;– the degree of distress one is experiencing– one's ability to cope with that distress, – the effect of the symptoms on oneself, one's

family, and one's work.

4 th edition copyright 2004 - prentice hall13-1 therapy chapter 13

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