Study Guide for Treatment of Psychological Disorders

5.5a Treatment of Psychological Disorders

Introduction to Therapy, and Psychodynamic and Humanistic Treatments

Harsh Treatment through history. Reformers Phillipe Pinel (18th century) and Dorothea Dix (19th century) pushed for humane treatment and the construction of mental hospitals. Since the 1950s, the introduction of effective therapy drugs therapies and community based treatment programs has emptied most of those hospitals.

Deinstitutionalization - the process, begun in the late twentieth century, of moving people with psychological disorders out of institutional facilities.

5.5-1 Treating Psychological Disorders

Deinstitutionalization - the process, begun in the late twentieth century, of moving people with psychological disorders out of institutional facilities.

 Today's therapists prefer to treat people with chronic mental illness in decentralized ways - combining medication and psychotherapy in inpatient or outpatient facilities.

Psychotherapy - treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical Therapy - prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person's physiology. A person with severe depression may receive anti-depressants, electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT) or brain stimulation.

Talk Therapies include these approaches:  psychodynamic, humanistic, behavioral and cognitive. Some therapists describe themselves as electric (using a blend of therapies).