Therapy Notes

Therapy

Treating Psychological Disorders

• Psychotherapy: Psychological techniques designed to help people modify emotional, behavioral, and cognitive patterns that cause difficulties. Also known as "talk therapy."
• Biomedical therapy: Medical intervention, which includes drug therapies and electroconvulsive therapy.

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Therapy

• Freudian Approach: Based on the theories of Sigmund Freud.
• Goal: To make the patient aware of unconscious processes.
• Approaches:
  • Dream interpretation
  • Free association

Humanistic Therapy

• Emphasizes: Realization of human potential.
• Rogers - Person-Centered Therapy:
  • Empathy: Understanding and sharing the feelings of another.
  • Unconditional Positive Regard: Accepting and supporting a person regardless of what they say or do.
  • Reflection: Restating a person's feelings and thoughts to help them understand themselves better.

Behavioral Therapy

• Addresses maladaptive behavior with learning and conditioning principles.
• Classical Conditioning Methods:
  • Exposure Therapy: Confronts clients with what they fear.
  • Flooding: Client confronts the feared stimulus all at once.
  • Systematic Desensitization: Client taught to relax as they are gradually exposed to what they fear.
  • Uses counterconditioning
• Operant Conditioning Methods:
  • Use reinforcement and punishment.
  • Token Economy: Desirable behaviors are rewarded with tokens that patients can exchange for rewards.

Cognitive Therapy

• Focuses on thought processes that are the basis of psychological symptoms.
• Aaron Beck: Emphasized automatic, irrational thoughts.
• Therapist questions client’s distorted assumptions and beliefs

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

• Combination of cognitive and behavior therapies.
• Identifies automatic irrational thoughts.
• Focus on changing thoughts and behavior.

Effectiveness of Psychotherapy

• All forms more effective than no therapy
• Efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy better established than other forms.

Drug Therapies

• Directly alter brain’s chemistry or physiology.
• Schizophrenia: Antipsychotic medications (dopamine antagonists).
  • Effective for delusions, hallucinations.
  • Side effects
• Anxiety: Anti-anxiety medications (GABA agonists).
  • Useful for short-term – calm jittery feelings, relax muscles.
• Antidepressant medications
• Depression: Antidepressant medications
  • Most common – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
• Bipolar Disorder: Mood stabilizers (e.g., lithium).
• Atypical antipsychotics – often used to treat mania

Brain Stimulation

• Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): Brief burst of electric current to induce seizure in the brain.
  • More effective than antidepressant drugs.
  • Side effect – memory loss