17: Treatment of Psychological Disorders - Cognitive Therapies

Question 1

Cognitive Therapies

Answer 1

• Focus on the roll of irrational and self-defeating thought patterns, and therapists who employ this approach thry to help clients discover and change the cognitions that underlie their problems
• they do not emphasize the importance of unconscious psychodynamic processes

Question 2

Ellis’s Rational-Emotive Therapy

ABCD Model

Answer 2

• Activating event – triggers the emotion
• Belief system – underlies way in which a person appraises the activating event
• Consequences – emotional and behavioural consequences of the appraisal
• Disputing – challenging an erroneous belief system

Question 3

Ellis’s Rational-Emotive Therapy

Ellis’s Thoughts

Answer 3

People are accustomed to viewing emotions (consequences) as being caused directly by activating events

• Emotions are actually caused by belief system, which must be countered and altered

Question 4

Beck’s Cognitive Therapy

The Goal

Answer 4

• Goal is to point out errors of thinking and logic that underlie emotional disturbances and to reprogram client’s automatic negative thought patterns
• In practice it is to allow client to come to realize that it is their thoughts which create the maladaptive emotional reaction and not the events themselves
• Tracing the line from event to thought to emotion –similar to Ellis but less confrontational

Question 5

Beck’s Cognitive Therapy

Self-Instructional Training

Answer 5

cognitive coping approach of giving adaptive self-instructions to oneself at crucial phases of the coping process

Question 6

Focus on Neuroscience

The Neuroscience of Treating Unipolar Depression

Answer 6

• The goal of this approach is to identify maladaptive thoughts and behaviours and, through therapy, help the patient to think more rationally.
• depression may stem from the underactivity of certain neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin (all known as monamines)
• Drug treatment for depression traget these monoamines, resulting in higher levvels of the neurotransmitters in specific brain areas. Areas such as, prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and the cingulate cortex
• maladaptive thoughts appear to be related to lower levels of serotonin.
• it would appear that talking therapy can alter brain function in much the same way that drug treatments do