Psychological Therapy Flashcards
What is psychotherapy?
A psychological intervention designed to help people to resolve emotional, behavioural, and interpersonal problems to improve quality of life.
What are some goals of psychotherapy?
- Reduce symptoms of disorder
- Enhance coping mechanisms
- Improve relationships
- Help people adjust to situations
- Improve quality of life
What is a method of psychotherapy?
Psychoanalysis
What are the types of therapies for psychological disorders?
Psychodynamic Humanistic Cognitive Behavioural Biological
What are the two types of psychodynamic therapies?
Psychoanalysis (Freud)
Psychodynamic therapies
What is the psychoanalytic approach?
Goal is to gain insight
- make unconscious conscious
- discover unconscious wishes and repressed memories.
What is free association?
Clients verbally report without censorship any thoughts, feelings or images that enter their awareness.
What is dream interpretation?
Psychoanalysts believe that dreams express impulses, fantasies and wishes that the client’s defences keep bottled up in the unconscious during waking hours.
What is transference?
Occurs when the client responds irrationally to the analyst as if she or here were an important figure from the client’s past.
What is interpersonal therapy?
Focuses almost exclusively on clients’ current relationships with important people in their lives.
How does interpersonal therapy different from traditional psychodynamic therapies?
Highly structured and time-limited, involving a maximum of 15 to 20 sessions.
What does interpersonal therapy involve?
Resolving role disputes
Resolving relationship conflicts
Adjusting to the loss or change in a relationship
Identifying and correcting social deficits
What are the therapies apart of the humanistic category?
Person-centred therapy and gestalt therapy
What is person-centred therapy?
Therapy in which the relationship between client and therapist is regarded highly in order to foster self-exploration and personal growth.
What did Rogers identify as the three most important therapist attributes?
Unconditional positive regard
Empathy
Genuineness
What is unconditional positive regard?
Therapist shows that he/she genuinely cares about and accepts the client without judgement or evaluation.
What is empathy (Rogers)?
The willingness and ability to view the world through the client’s eyes. Therapist needs to understand the feelings and experiences of the client and should often express them back to the client by rephrasing it to show understanding.
What is genuineness according to Rogers?
Refers to consistency between the way the therapist feels and the way he or she behaves.
What is gestalt therapy?
Gestalt refers to the perceptual principles that allow a person to actively organised stimuli into a whole picture. Gestalt therapy (Perls) utilises a variety of imaginative techniques to help clients get in touch with their inner selves.
What is the empty chair technique?
A role-playing technique used in gestalt therapy in which a client is asked to carry on a conversation between themselves and a person of interest, physically acting out both people in the conversation.
What are the therapies involved in the cognitive therapies?
Ellis’ rational-emotive therapy
Beck’s cognitive therapy
What is Ellis’s rational-emotive therapy?
The idea of ABCD (activating event, belief system, consequences, disputing). The therapy works to undermine the maladaptive thought patterns that suggest that emotions are directly caused by events, but by irrational thoughts themselves.
What goal does rational-emotive therapy have?
Clients are able to understand the ideas that underlie their maladaptive emotional responses and analyse and change negative self-statements.
What is Beck’s cognitive therapy?
Points out errors of thinking and logic that underlie emotional disturbance and to help clients identify and reprogram their over-learned automatic thought patterns. Uses CBT.
What is the difference between REBT and CBT?
REBT focuses on self-acceptance whereas CBT focuses on uplifting an individual and self-growth.
What is the goal of CBT?
Identifying and modifying unrealistic/negative thought patterns
Identifying and modifying maladaptive behavioural patterns
Improving emotional functioning
What is the treatment process of CBT?
- Therapeutic relationship
- Assessment
- Psychoeducation
- Behavioural techniques
- Identify problematic thinking (ABC)
- Challenge unhelpful thinking (ABCD)
- Maintenance
What are some examples of unhelpful thinking styles?
Catastrophising Black and white thinking Overgeneralising Personalisation Jumping to conclusions Mental filter Labelling
What is important in a therapeutic relationship?
Trust Empathy Active listening Non-judgemental Alliance Hope
What are the forms of therapy apart of the category of behavioural therapy?
Classical conditioning
Operant conditioning
Modelling
“third-wave” cognitive behavioural therapies
What are the most common classical conditioning procedures?
Exposure therapy
Systematic desensitisation
Aversion therapy
Describe exposure therapy
As anxiety, fears and phobias can be due to conditioned fear responses, exposure therapy requires that the client is exposed to the conditioned stimulus that elicits fear in order to cause extinction of the anxiety response.
How does extinction of anxiety work?
A client who has a fear of dogs due to being attacked by a dog in the past may be exposed to dogs and will remain in the presence of dogs. The client will then learn that an attack (unconditioned stimulus) will not occur and therefore the anxiety will extinguish over time.
What is systematic desensitisation?
A learning based treatment for anxiety disorders in which counterconditioning is used - a new response that is incompatible with anxiety is conditioned to the anxiety-arousing CS.
What is the difference between extinction and counterconditioning?
Extinction requires only exposure to the CS whereas counterconditioning requires a substitute response to counter the anxiety response.
What is the process of systematic desensitisation?
The therapist deeply relaxes the client and then asks them to vividly imagine the first scene in a hierarchy of low-anxiety scenes to high-anxiety scenes. The client can’t be both relaxed and anxious at the same time so if the relaxation is strong enough then it replaces anxiety as the CR to the CS. This continues until they reach high-anxiety scenes.
What is aversion therapy?
The therapist pairs a stimulus that is attractive to the client with an unpleasant UCS in an attempt to condition an aversion to the CS. This is often used in cases in which the stimulus that provides pleasure in unacceptable socially.
What is an example of aversion therapy?
Client who drinks excessively pairs the feeling of being sick with alcohol so that they associate it with illness and become averted.
What is an example of a positive reinforcement technique?
Token economy
Describe token economy
Involves the systematic application of positive reinforcement to strengthen desired behaviours. It is used in a clinical setting as clients in psychiatric hospitalisation are given a plastic token every time they exhibit desirable behaviours, and they can redeem the tokens for reinforcers.
What is behavioural activation therapy?
A behavioural treatment for depression that increases positively reinforcing behaviours. Rather than trying to change cognitions, the therapist will identify behaviours that are rewarding and will thereby reduce depression.
How is behavioural activation therapy different to cognitive perspectives of therapy?
Clients are taught to counter depression thoughts not by challenging and trying to change them, but by simply turning their attention outwards and concentrating on rewarding stimuli.
How is modelling used in behaviour therapies?
Through observational learning and social skills training
What is social skills training?
Clients learn new skills by observing and then imitating a model who performs a socially skilful behaviour.
Who can social skills training be useful to?
Individuals who have minor deficits in social skills
Delinquents who need to learn how to resist negative peer pressure
Hospitalised schizophrenic patients who need to learn social skills in order to function outside the hospital.
Describe mindfulness-based treatments
Mindfulness as a mental state is often defined as a state of awareness, focus, openness and acceptance of immediate experience. It involves non-judgemental appraisal, acceptance or non-reactivity. Consists of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
What is mindfulness-based stress reduction?
An 8-week group program that includes weekly 2-hour sessions of meditation and an all day meditation retreat. Applied to treat stress-related disorders and depression.
What is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy?
Therapy based on a model of cognitive vulnerability to depressive relapse and is used in order to help individuals identify automatic dysfunctional cognitive processes and disengage from them.
What is mindfulness-based relapse prevention?
Used with substance abusers in order to reduce thoughts of self-blame and hopelessness during relapses. It can also be used to reduce craving.
What is acceptance and commitment therapy?
Focuses on the process of mindfulness as a primary vehicle for change. Teaches clients to notice, accept and embrace thoughts and feelings, even unwanted ones, in order to reduce the emotional impact of the thought.
What is dialectical behaviour therapy?
A multimodal intervention program developed specifically for the treatment of BPD. A major goal of treatment is to bring self-destructive behaviours under control.
What are some features of family therapy?
Disorder related to problem in family functioning (e.g. parents fighting - child difficulties)
Focus on structure of family system
Intervention; disrupt dysfunctional patterns (e.g. misbehaving for attention)
What components are focused on in family therapy?
Relational patterns Relationship building Promoting awareness Communication Reduce blame Perspective taking Compromise
What are some features of group therapy?
Multiple (unrelated) clients; 6-12 clients Typically similar problems Meet to work on therapeutic goals Similar issues to address Agree to confidentiality Approach depends on therapeutic style
What are some features of couples therapy?
Communication between partners Identify and alter unhelpful patterns Miscommunication and/or lack of communication = barriers to intimacy and happiness Relationship goals/expectations Rebuild trust Role playing
What are the forms of biological treatment?
Psychosurgery
Electroconvulsive therapy
Pharmacotherapy
What are psychoactive medications?
Most common biological treatment for chemical imbalances in brain. Less invasive than surgery.
What are the types of psychoactive medications?
Neuroleptics (antipsychotics)
Antidepressants
Lithium and anticonvulsants
Describe antipsychotics
Chlorpromazine: reduce severity of psychotic symptoms
Hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, disordered thinking, confused speech. Can cause side effects and compliance.
Describe antidepressants
Most effective for moderate depression
50%-60% experience improved mood, appetite, sleep, physical activity
Often important alongside psychological treatment
Describe lithium
Antimanic agent
Used as a mood stabiliser in bipolar disorder
What are tranquillisers (anxiolytics)
Treat symptoms of anxiety
Reduce tension (physical/psychological)
Immediate calming effect
Describe electroconvulsive therapy
Induce seizure via electric current
Originally used for schizophrenia, depression and sometimes mania
General anaesthetic and muscle relaxant
Has a potential for relapse
What is an alternative to ECT?
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
Pulsating magnetic coil placed over prefrontal regions of the brain
Treat depression with minimal side effects
