Therapy Notes

Therapy Notes

Psychological Therapies- treatment based upon psychological principles.

Biomedical Therapies- treatment that focuses on altering the brain with drugs, psychosurgery, or electroconvulsive therapy.

Schools of Psychology

Psychoanalysis

• Freud’s therapy (hypnosis etc.)
• Used free association, hypnosis, and dream interpretation to gain insight into the client’s unconscious.

Humanistic Therapy

• Focuses on present and future
• Focus on conscious thoughts
• Take responsibility for your actions-instead of blaming childhood anxieties.
• Two popular forms of therapy: group therapy, self-help support groups.
• Most widely used humanistic technique (Carl Rogers)- Client (Person) Centered Therapy: therapist uses genuineness, acceptance, and empathy to show unconditional positive regard toward clients.

Behavior Therapies

• Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
• Three Types of Therapy:
• Systematic Desensitization- type of counterconditioning that associates pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli.
• Exposure Therapy- form of desensitization where the client directly confronts the anxiety provoking stimulus
• Aversive Conditioning- type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.
• Token Economy: an operant conditioning procedure that rewards a desired behavior.

Cognitive Therapies

• A therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumptions that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Biomedical Therapies

Psychopharmacology- the study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

Three classes of drugs:

• Antipsychotic Drugs- take if you are hallucinated, agitated;antipsychotic drugs are a class of medicines used to treat psychosis and other mental and emotional conditions.
• Antianxiety Drugs- drugs like Valium and Librium. like alcohol, they depress nervous system activity. Most widely abused drugs.
• Antidepressant Drugs- Lift you up out of depression. Most increase the neurotransmitter Norepinephrine.
• Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft- work by blocking serotonin reuptake
• You become guinea pig for all medications, until they find correct one.
• Electroconvulsive Therapy- Biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which brief electric current is sent through the brain of anesthetized patient.