Psychological therapies for schizophrenia

Question 1

What three types of psychological treatments are there?

Answer 1

CBT
Family therapy
Token economies

Question 2

What is the aim of CBT?

Answer 2

To identify and change irrational thoughts

Question 3

What is the purpose of CBT?

Answer 3

Tries to get you to want to make sense of delusions and hallucinations and how they both impact on your feelings in order to reduce a patients anxiety and make symptoms easier to deal with

Question 4

What did Tukington et al (2004) find?

Answer 4

Patient thought that the mafia was out to get him

Question 5

What is the structure of CBT?

Answer 5

5-10 sessions, either in groups or individually

Question 6

What are the ways in which the patient and therapist communicate in CBT?

Answer 6

Discussion manner

Argumentative 1

Question 7

What is the overall aim of family therapy?

Answer 7

To improve communication within schizophrenic families

Question 8

What does the use of family therapy assume?

Answer 8

Family is the root cause - double-bind and schizophrenogenic mother

Question 9

What does family therapy aim to do to stress levels?

Answer 9

Reduce stress levels

Reduce high expressed emotion

Question 10

What does family therapy increase the chance of?

Answer 10

Compliance with medication to reduce relapse

Question 11

How does family therapy fulfil its aims? (Faro et al (2010) findings)

Answer 11

• Forming a therapeutic alliance with all family members
• Reducing the stress of caring for a relative with Sz
• Improving the ability of the family to anticipate and solve problems
• Reduce anger and guilt in family members
• Help family members achieve a balance between caring for an individual with Sz and maintaining their own lives
• Improving family beliefs and behaviours about Sz
• Reduce stress
• Reduce EE

Question 12

What are token economies?

Answer 12

Reward systems

Question 13

What type of conditioning does token economies use?

Answer 13

Operant

Question 14

What do Sz patients get rewards for?

Answer 14

They may have maladaptive behaviours, eg. hygiene issues, and if they modify these behaviours to improve their quality of life they will receive a reward

Question 15

Are tokens primary or secondary reinforcers? Why?

Answer 15

Secondary

They only have value once the patient has learned they can be used for rewards

Question 16

When are the tokens given?

Answer 16

immediately after the positive behaviour to prevent ‘delay discounting’ which would reduce the impact of the reward

Question 17

What did Jayhar et al (2014) find?

Answer 17

34 studies into CBT

CBT had a significant but fairly small impact on both positive and negative symptoms

Question 18

What did Faro et al find about effectiveness of family therapy?

Answer 18

Helps to reduce admissions over a year, improves the quality of life of the patient and family

Question 19

What did McMonagle and Sultana (2009) find?

Answer 19

Only 3 studies where patients had been randomly allocated to conditions. It is important to match the patient to control groups. Only one of the 3 demonstrated improvement in symptoms

Question 20

Overall, what is the evidence like for family therapy?

Answer 20

Inconsistent and weak

Question 21

Do psychological treatments cure Sz?

Answer 21

They improve the quality of life but they dont cure Sz

Question 22

What is the quality of the evidence for effectiveness like

Answer 22

Psychological treatments do help but in studies where there is no control group and if there is they are randomly allocated.