A variety of individual psychotherapies designed to give people a better awareness and understanding of their feelings, motivations, and actions in the hope that this will help them adjust.  Psychoanalysis  Client-centered therapy  Gestalt therapy

Based on the belief that anxiety and other problems are symptoms of inner conflicts stemming from childhood.  Free Association: A technique that encourages the patient to talk without inhibition about whatever thoughts or fantasies come to mind.

 Transference: The patient’s carrying over to the analyst feelings held toward childhood authority figures.  Insight: Awareness of previously unconscious feelings and memories and how they influence present feelings and behavior.

 Nondirectional form of therapy developed by Carl Rogers that calls for unconditional positive regard of the client by the therapist with the goal of helping the client become fully functioning.

 Rogers used the term client rather than patient to highlight the more active and equal role he assigned to the person seeking therapy.

 Rogers emphasized understanding life from the client’s point of view.  A therapist must be nondirective and reflect back to the client what he/she has said.

 A therapy that emphasizes the wholeness of the personality and attempts to reawaken people to their emotions and sensations in the here-and-now.

 Fritz Perls encouraged face-to-face confrontations to help people become more genuine or “real” in their day-to-day interactions.  The therapist is active and directive.

Therapeutic approaches that are based on the belief that all behavior is learned, and that the objective of therapy is to teach people new, more satisfying ways of behaving.  Classical conditioning  Operant conditioning  Modeling

 Systematic desensitization: A technique for reducing fear and anxiety by gradually associating a new response (relaxation) with stimuli that have been causing the fear and anxiety.  Flooding: A method of desensitization through intense and prolonged exposure to anxiety-producing stimuli.

 Aversive Conditioning: Techniques aimed at eliminating undesirable behavior patterns by teaching the person to associate them with pain and discomfort.

 Behavior Contracting: The client and therapist set behavioral goals and agree on reinforcements the client will receive upon reaching those goals.  Token Economy: Patients earn tokens (reinforcers) for desired behaviors and exchange them for desired items or privileges.

 A behavior therapy in which the person learns desired behaviors by watching others perform those behaviors.

Emphasize changing clients’ perceptions of their life situation as a way of modifying their behavior.  Stress-inoculation therapy  Rational-emotive-therapy  Beck’s cognitive therapy

 Trains clients to cope with stressful situations by learning a more useful pattern of self- talk.  Stress-inoculation therapy works by turning the client’s own thought patterns into a kind of vaccine against stress-induced anxiety.

A directive therapy based on the idea that clients’ psychological distress is caused by irrational and self-defeating beliefs and the therapist’s job is to challenge such dysfunctional beliefs.  Irrational/self-defeating beliefs involve absolutes (e.g., “musts” and “shoulds”) that allow no room for mistakes.

Therapy that depends on identifying and changing inappropriately negative and self- critical patterns of thought.  Therapists try to help clients examine each dysfunctional thought in a supportive but objectively scientific manner.

Clients meet regularly to interact and help one another achieve insight into their feelings and behavior.  family therapy  couple therapy

 Allows client and therapist to see how client acts around others.  Offers a client social support.  Can help the client learn new behaviors.  Interaction with others may lead to insight into one’s own behavior.  Less expensive than individual therapy.

 The family is seen as partly responsible for the individual’s problems.  Family therapy seeks to change all family members’ behaviors to the benefit of the family unit as well as the troubled individual.

A form of group therapy intended to help troubled partners improve their problems of communication and interaction.  Empathy Training: Each person is taught to share inner feelings and to listen to and understand the partner’s feelings before responding to them.

 Therapy benefits two-thirds of the people undergoing it.  Only 1 out of 3 people improve without therapy.  In general, no one therapy appears to be more effective than another.

 A group of treatment approaches, such as medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychosurgery.  These treatments are sometimes used to treat psychological disorders in conjunction with, or instead of, psychotherapy.

 The development of several effective drugs.  Drug therapies cost less than psychotherapy.  Critics contend that drugs are used because of our society’s “pill mentality.”

 Antipsychotics: Drugs (e.g., Thorazine) used to treat very severe psychological disorders, particularly schizophrenia.  Antidepressants: Drugs (e.g., MAO inhibitors, Prozac) used to combat depression.

 Lithium is a naturally occurring salt that is used to treat bipolar disorder.  Lithium helps level out the extreme highs of mania and the extreme lows of depression.

 A mild electrical current is passed through the brain for a short period, often producing convulsions and temporary coma; used to treat severe, prolonged depression.  The reason ECT works remains unknown.

 Brain surgery performed to change a person’s behavior and emotional state (e.g., prefrontal lobotomy).  This therapy is rarely used today.

 The policy of treating people with severe psychological disorders in the community rather than in large public hospitals.

 Community mental-health centers are poorly funded or non-existent.  Ex-patients are poorly prepared to live in the community.  Not enough housing available.  Social stigma of having a mental disorder.  Large insurance companies discourage outpatient care.

 Primary prevention  Techniques and programs to improve the social environment so that new cases of mental disorders do not develop.  Secondary prevention  Programs to identify groups that are at high risk for mental disorders and to detect maladaptive behavior in these groups and treat it properly.  Tertiary prevention  Programs to help people adjust to community life after release from a mental hospital.

 Women are more likely than men to be in psychotherapy.  Psychotherapy is more socially accepted for women than men.  Traditionally, women have received a disproportionate share of psychotropic drugs.

 Our ideas of what constitutes normal behavior may not be viewed as normal by another culture.  Some psychological disorders only occur within a specific culture.