Therapies And Treatments Flashcards
Group therapy
So to sum things up, for families like Mary’s, talk-therapy among a group instead of one-on-one makes sense. Therapists sometimes work with groups who already know each other, like family members and couples, and sometimes with groups that share a common goal. Group therapy allows the therapy session to focus on interpersonal interaction and communication strategies more than individual therapy. It can also help to see others who are going through the same problem as you - this is a founding principle of non-therapist led, self-help style therapy groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoots like Marijuana Anonymous. Group therapy can make a therapy session more like a real-world interaction.
Individual therapy
Psychodynamic approach: Dream analysis, free association, transference.
Cognitive therapy: treats depression and anxiety.
Behavioral therapy: exposure therapy (systematic desensitization), flooding, aversion therapy, social skills training; treats schizophrenia.
Humanistic approach: active listening, unconditional positive regard; focuses on interpersonal interactions and communication strategies.
Psychiatric drugs
We’ve gone over three major classes of drugs for three disorders: antidepressants for major depression, antipsychotics for schizophrenia and lithium for bipolar disorders. These all work by altering brain chemistry, though in the case of lithium the exact mechanism is unknown. These drugs can be really helpful to some patients, though psychologists worry about prescribing them without careful consideration or as a substitute for talk therapy. Since many of the drugs do not keep working after a patient stops treatment, many patients take them for a very long time and such long-term side effects aren’t always known. Given these problems, psychiatric medication should be seen as simply one type of therapy, likely to be used alongside other types, and not a be-all-and-end-all treatment for psychological disorders.
Biological therapy
Biological therapies gave early psychiatrists a chance to use some of the methods of other medical doctors; frustrated with committing mentally ill people to institutions for the rest of their lives, they tried extreme surgical and medical procedures to try to ‘fix’ their most difficult patients. Methods like electroconvulsive therapy are still used today in cases of severe depression that are not responsive to other treatments; insulin-shock therapy and lobotomies are no longer performed due to issues of effectiveness and ethics. Some limited forms of psychosurgery are still performed, but only with a patient’s consent. All biological treatments rest on the idea that the mind and body are connected, and represent a move away from Freud’s theories of the unconscious as the source of all mental illness.
Treatments effectiveness
Assessing treatment effectiveness is important for developing standards and giving therapists some guidance about what to try with their patients. While patient and therapist reports are important–after all, improvement that is ‘subjective’ or the result of a placebo is still improvement–they are not as useful as controlled research studies for determining which treatments work best for certain disorders. Regardless of method, therapists who are warm and encouraging and patients who have large support networks tend to have the most success.
Biological therapy
Biological therapies gave early psychiatrists a chance to use some of the methods of other medical doctors; frustrated with committing mentally ill people to institutions for the rest of their lives, they tried extreme surgical and medical procedures to try to ‘fix’ their most difficult patients. Methods like electroconvulsive therapy are still used today in cases of severe depression that are not responsive to other treatments; insulin-shock therapy and lobotomies are no longer performed due to issues of effectiveness and ethics. Some limited forms of psychosurgery are still performed, but only with a patient’s consent. All biological treatments rest on the idea that the mind and body are connected, and represent a move away from Freud’s theories of the unconscious as the source of all mental illness.
Depressants
Depressants are drugs that slow down the activity of the central nervous system. Depressants are useful in treating many medical conditions, including insomnia, anxiety, and seizures. There are several different types of depressants, including barbiturates, benzodiazepines, alcohol, opioids, cannabis, and Rohypnol. Depressants should never be mixed, as doing so will cause the effects of the drugs to multiply.
