Treatments Flashcards
What are the two behavioural treatments of phobias?
- Systematic Desensitisation (SD) - Joseph Wolpe
- Flooding
What are the three stages of Systematic Desensitisation?
- Fear Hierarchy
- Relaxation training
- Graduated Exposure
What is fear hierarchy?
- The client and therapist work together to construct a fear hierarchy
- This is a list of situations in which the client would feel anxiety, arranged from least to most anxiety produced
What is relaxation training?
- The client is taught different techniques for relaxing
- These would probably include controlling breathing and muscular tension by using progressive muscle relaxation and might include other techniques
What is graduated exposure?
- Over the course of 6-12 sessions, the client is gradually bought into contact with their phobic object/situation
- They start at the bottom of the fear hierarchy and gradually work their way upwards
- they move up once they are able to completely relax
What two ways can exposure be done?
- In vitro - the client imagines exposure to the phobic stimulus
- In vivo- the client is actually exposed to the phobic stimulus
What is reciprocal inhibition? And why is it crucial to the treatment of phobias?
- The idea that two opposite emotions (like fear and relaxation) cannot co-exist at the same time. Hence under very specific relaxation techniques you cannot be anxious
- so relaxation is associated with calm so the phobia is counter-conditioned in this way
Summarise evaluations of systematic desensitisation
- research - Wolpe - successful in treating 91% of phobias
- does not deal with root cause of phobia
- ethical - patient has more control
- benefit is not the same for all phobias e.g. agoraphobia and social phobias
What is flooding?
The aim of flooding is to expose the sufferer to the phobic object or situation for an extended period of time in a safe and controlled manner - this is largely done using in vivo methods
What is the key principle in flooding?
- Fear is a time limited physical response
- The initial strong bodily arousal (caused by adrenaline) can only last so long before the body calms down, hence the initial anxiety response becomes exhausted and extinct
What does flooding achieve?
- The prolonged intense exposure then eventually creates a new association between the feared stimulus and a calm response
- It also prevents escape or avoidance. This should eliminate the phobia
Summarise evaluations of flooding
- Research to support - Wolpe used flooding to successfully treat girls phobia of being in a car
- Unethical - especially with children - worst situation presented immediately - no protection from harm
- cost effective
- less effective with some phobias such as social phobias and agoraphobia
Describe the principles of using drug treatment
Low levels of serotonin are a casual factor of OCD, so treatment focuses on increasing levels of serotonin. SSRI’s aim to alleviate symptoms of OCD by increasing amount of available serotonin.
Describe the use of antidepressants/SSRI’s
- Block the reuptake pump in the synapse, reducing rate of serotonin reabsorption making more available in the synaptic gap - Due to increased availability, some serotonin receptors reduce in numbers (down regulation)
- This process ultimately makes each serotonin cell fire more rapidly, increasing serotonin levels
Describe the use of anti-anxiety drugs
- Valium and Benzodiazepines
- work by boosting the power of inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA (which slows neurons)
