Week 8: Psychological Treatment Part 2 Flashcards
Group therapy
Group therapy is psychotherapy in which clients receive psychological treatment together with others.
A professionally trained therapist guides the group, usually between six and 10 participants, to create an atmosphere of support and emotional safety for the participants.
Group therapy is often cheaper than individual therapy, as the therapist can treat more people at the same time. Group therapy allows people to help each other, by sharing ideas, problems, and solutions. It provides social support, offers the knowledge that other people are facing and successfully coping with similar situations, and allows group members to model the successful behaviours of other group members.
Group therapy is particularly effective for people who have life-altering illness, as it helps them cope better with their disease, enhances the quality of their lives.
Group therapy can take the form of couples therapy and family therapy.
Self-Help Groups
A self-help group is a voluntary association of people who share a common desire to overcome psychological disorder or improve their well-being.
Self-help groups have been used to help individuals cope with many types of addictive behaviours. Three of the best-known self-help groups are Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous.
As in group therapy, the benefits include social support, education, and observational learning. Religion and spirituality are often emphasized, and self-blame is discouraged. Regular group meetings are held with the supervision of a trained leader.
Community Mental Health: Service and Prevention
Community mental health services are psychological treatments and interventions that are distributed at the community level.
Community mental health services are provided by nurses, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals in sites such as schools, hospitals, police stations, drug treatment clinics, and residential homes.
Unlike traditional therapy, the primary goal of community mental health services is prevention.
Community prevention can be focused on one or more of three levels: primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention.
Primary prevention is prevention in which all members of the community receive the treatment.
Secondary prevention is more limited and focuses on people who are most likely to need it — those who display risk factors for a given disorder.
Tertiary prevention is treatment, such as psychotherapy or biomedical therapy, that focuses on people who are already diagnosed with disorder.
Telehealth Psychology Barriers
Clinician barriers to telehealth psychology include negative perceptions of efficacy and therapeutic alliance, uncertainty surrounding ethical obligations, high-perceived practical burden and inadequate training.
Effectiveness of Psychological Therapy
Thousands of studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of psychotherapy, and by and large they find evidence that it works.
Some outcome studies compare a group that gets treatment with another (control) group that gets no treatment. Although studies such as this one control for the possibility of natural improvement, they do not control for either nonspecific treatment effects or for placebo effects. The people in the treatment group might have improved simply by being in the therapy (nonspecific effects), or they may have improved because they expected the treatment to help them (placebo effects).
An alternative is to compare a group that gets real therapy with a group that gets only a placebo. Studies that use a control group that gets no treatment or a group that gets only a placebo are informative, but they also raise ethical questions. If the researchers believe that their treatment is going to work, why would they deprive some of their participants, who are in need of help, of the possibility for improvement by putting them in a control group?
Another type of outcome study compares different approaches with each other (CBT with Social Skills Training vs CBT Alone).
What a good therapist practising psychodynamic approaches does in therapy is often not much different from what a humanist or a cognitive-behavioural therapist does, and so no one approach is really likely to be better than the other.
Effectiveness of Biomedical Therapies
Although there are fewer of them because fewer studies have been conducted, meta-analyses also support the effectiveness of drug therapies for psychological disorder. For instance, the use of psychostimulants to reduce the symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is well known to be successful, and many studies find that the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia are substantially reduced by the use of antipsychotic medications.
People who take antidepressants for mood disorders or antianxiety medications for anxiety disorders almost always report feeling better, although drugs are less helpful for phobic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
One problem with drug therapies is that although they provide temporary relief, they don’t treat the underlying cause of the disorder. Once the patient stops taking the drug, the symptoms often return in full force. In addition many drugs have negative side effects, and some also have the potential for addiction and abuse.
Older patients face special difficulties when they take medications for mental illness. Older people are more sensitive to drugs, and drug interactions are more likely because older patients tend to take a variety of different drugs every day. They are more likely to forget to take their pills, to take too many or too few, or to mix them up due to poor eyesight or faulty memory.
Like all types of drugs, medications used in the treatment of mental illnesses can carry risks to an unborn infant.
Effectiveness of Social-Community Approaches
Data suggest that prevention programs that provide supplemental foods, health-care referral, and nutrition education for low-income families are successful in leading to higher birth weight babies and lower infant mortality.
Although some of the many community-based programs designed to reduce alcohol, tobacco, and drug abuse; violence and delinquency; and mental illness have been successful, the changes brought about by even the best of these programs are, on average, modest.
The most beneficial preventive interventions for young people involve coordinated, systemic efforts to enhance their social and emotional competence and health.
