Psychology Notes: Psychological Therapy

Psychological Therapy
- treatments based on psychological principles

• biomedical therapy: treatments that focus on altering the brain with drugs, psycho-surgery, or electro-convulsive therapy
• therapy - used to be abnormal but became institutionalized; new drugs and better therapy, US want policy of deinstitutionalization

Psychotherapy:

1. Psychoanalysis: Freud's therapy, use free association, hypnosis and dream interpretation to gain insight into the client's unconscious
2. Humanistic Therapy: focus of people's potential for self-fulfillment; focus on present and future; focus on conscious thoughts; take responsibility for your actions - instead of blaming childhood anxieties

                - group therapy and self help

• Client (Person) Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, in which therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate client's growth

     3. Behavior Therapy: applies to learning principles to eliminate unwanted behavior, problems we must change to better behavior
                - systematic desensitization: counter conditioning that associates a 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: counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior
                - operant conditioning: Token Economy- operant conditioning procedure that rewards a desired behavior
     4. Cognitive Therapy: teaches people how to think and how to act; based on assumptions that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions

Biomedical Therapy:

• Psychopharmacology- study effects of drugs on mind and behavior
• Antipsychotic Drugs: (hallucination, delusion, and agitations) class of medicines used to treat psychosis and other mental or emotional conditions
• Antianxiety Drugs: includes drugs like Valium and Librium; like alcohol, depress nervous system activity, most widely abused drugs
• Antidepressant Drugs: lift you out of depression; most increase the neurotransmitter
• Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft: work by blocking serotonin reuptake
• Electroconvulsive Therapy: for severely depressed patients in which brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient