Psychotherapies

Breaking the Stigma

Mental health stigma prevents people from
seeking help. To break it, we must:

• Educate

• Normalize

• Support

• Empathize

Therapy Ethical Guidelines

• Nonmaleficence

  • Do no harm (psychological distress or physical harm)

• Fidelity

  • Loyalty, trustworthiness, and maintaining professional
    relationships

• Integrity

  • Honesty, accuracy, and truthfulness

• Respect of People’s Rights and Dignity

  • Right to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination

Psychotherapy

Involves emotional charged, confiding interaction between a trained therapist and a patient.

Biomedical Therapy

Uses prescription drugs or other procedures that act on the patient’s nervous system, alleviating him or her of psychological distress.

Psychoanalysis

• Developed by Freud

• Aim: Bring repressed feelings
  into conscious awareness
  where the patient can deal with
  them

• When the energy devoted to
  the id-ego-superego conflict is
  released, the patient’s anxiety
  lessons

The Method

• Freud developed the method of free association to unravel the
  unconscious mind and its conflicts.

  • The patient edits his thoughts, resisting feelings to express
    emotions. The resistance becomes important in the analysis
    of conflict-drive anxiety.

  • Eventually the patient opens up and reveals his innermost
    private thoughts, developing positive transference first and
    then shifting to negative transference (link) of feelings
    towards the therapist.

Effectiveness

• Criticism:

  • Hard to refute because it
    cannot be proven or
    disproven.

  • Takes a long time and is very
    expensive.

• New variation is psychodynamic
  interpersonal therapy in which
  the therapist tries to understand
  symptoms and themes across
  important relationships in the
  patient’s life

Humanistic

Aim to boost self-
fulfillment by
helping people
grow in self-
awareness and self-
acceptance.

The Method

• Founded by Carl Rogers

• Active listening – listen to the
  needs of the patient in an
  accepting and non-judgmental
  way

• Echo, restate, and clarify the
  patient’s thinking – Addresses
  problems in a productive way to
  build his or her self-esteem

Token Economy

Therapists may create a token economy in which patients exchange a token of some sort, earned for exhibiting the desired behavior, for various privileges or treats.

Exposure Therapy

Expose patients to things they fear and avoid. Through repeated exposures, anxiety lessons because they habituate to the things feared.

Systematic Desensitization

A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety- triggering stimuli.

Counterconditioning

A procedure that conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors.

Aversive Conditioning

A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.

Cognitive

A structured, short-term, and action-oriented psychotherapy focused on changing dysfunctional thinking.

Rationale Emotion Therapy

- Activating Event: Something

happens in the environment around

you

B - Beliefs: You hold a belief about the

event or situation

C - Consequence: You have an emotional response

to your belief

D - Disruption of Belief

E - Effective or New Effective Response

Identity, challenge, gain insight

Thought Record

1. Situation: What happened? (e.g., "I made a mistake on a report")

2. Moods/Emotions: What did you feel? (e.g., Anxious, Sad)

3. Automatic Thought: What went through your mind? (e.g., "I am
   incapable of doing this job")

4. Evidence For: What facts support this thought? (e.g., "I did miss a
   deadline")

5. Evidence Against: What facts contradict this thought? (e.g., "I have
   passed 10 other reports this year")

6. Alternative/Balanced Thought: A new, objective thought (e.g., "I made
   a mistake, but I am usually competent and can improve")

7. Outcome: How do you feel now?

The Method

Teaches people adaptive ways of thinking and acting based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Designed to help people manage intense emotions and
improve their relationships

1st Generation or
Classical
Antipsychotics

(Thorazine) Remove a number of positive
symptoms associated with schizophrenia
such as agitation, delusions, and
hallucinations

2nd Generation or Atypical Antipsychotics

(Clozapine) Remove a number of negative
symptoms associated with schizophrenia
such as apathy, jumbled thoughts,
concentration difficulties, and difficulties in
interacting with others

Antianxiety Drugs

Drugs, like Xanax and Ativan,
depress the central nervous
system and reduce anxiety
and tension by elevating the
levels of GABA.

Mood Stabilizers

Lithium Carbonate, a
common salt, moderates the
levels of norepinephrine and
glutamate neurotransmitters.

ECT

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) is used for SEVERELY
DEPRESSED patients who DO NOT respond to
prescription drugs.