1. Abnormal Psychology Ms. Rebecca
Methods of Therapy
Abnormal Psychology
Ms. Rebecca

2. Do Now: What is one reason why you think someone would go to therapy?

3. Therapy Methods of treating psychological problems and disorders.

4. 2 categories of therapy:
1. Psychological Methods
2. Biological Methods

5. Goals of psychological methods (psychotherapy)
Fix the many thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors that cause problems in peoples’ lives by talking with a professional.

6. Goals of biological therapy
Fix psychological problems by taking medicine or changing the physical nervous system or brain in some way (drugs, medical procedures/surgery).

7. Psychotherapy
Goal: provide hope, new perspective and trust for fixing problems. Help self-esteem.

8. Most common methods of psychotherapy
Psychoanalysis
Humanistic Therapy
Cognitive Therapy
Behavior Therapy
Check out table on page 437!

9. Psychoanalysis
Goals: Replace avoidance of things you don’t like with coping with them. Reduce inappropriate anxiety and guilty feelings.
Key Techniques: Free association; dream analysis; transference (transferring emotions about one person to your therapist)

10. Humanistic Therapy
Goals: Remove obstacles to self-actualization. (Figure out your goals in life and be able to reach them)
Key Techniques: active listening; unconditional positive regard

11. Cognitive Therapy
Goals: Replace self-defeating attitudes and beliefs with more rational, self-enhancing attitudes and beliefs.
Key Techniques: teach and encourage clients to challenge irrational beliefs and replace them with rational beliefs and attitudes.

12. Behavior Therapy
Goals: Replace maladaptive, self-defeating behavior with good, self-enhancing behavior.
Key Techniques: modeling, aversive conditioning, operant conditioning (train new behavior).

13. Types of Psychologists
Counseling Psychologist
Clinical Psychologist
Psychiatrist
Psychiatric Social Worker
Psychiatric Nurse

14. Other people who can help:
Teachers, guidance counselors, ministers or religious leaders, family doctors….
Often, these are the people who are turned to first.

15. Types of Therapy
Individual vs. Group Therapy

16. Advantages of Individual Therapy
People get more personal attention.
People who feel more comfortable talking about their problems alone are more likely to be open with a therapist one-on-one.

17. Advantages of Group therapy
People can realize that they aren’t alone in having their problems.
People can learn how to deal with their problems by listening to how other people who had the same problems dealt with them.
People can practice social skills in a supportive environment.
People see that therapy CAN work when they see other members of the group recovering.

18. Types of Group Therapy Couples Therapy: for marriage issues
Family Therapy: for all members of a family who love someone with a problem.
Self-help groups: therapy for people all facing the same problem.
Encounter groups: strangers who do not necessarily share common problems. They may just want to grow emotionally and become aware of their own feelings and the feelings of others.

19. Psychoanalytic Approach
Developed by Sigmund Freud.
Unconscious thoughts and feelings are the root of peoples’ problems.
Clients need to be helped to become aware of these unconscious thoughts and feelings to resolve the problems of their daily lives.
How? Free association, dream analysis, transference

20. Free Association
The psychoanalyst tells the client to relax and sat whatever comes to mind. Analyst doesn’t say much.
The idea is that if the client can say what is on their mind, eventually unconscious thoughts and feelings will come to the surface.

21. How does it work?
Based on what the client says, or doesn’t say, the analyst interprets meaning.
Resistance: When a client won’t talk about certain issues during free association or makes jokes about certain issues it is thought that the reason is to repress or deny painful feelings.

22. Transference
Many clients start to see the relationship with their analyst as being similar to a relationship they have in real life. The client then begins to treat the analyst like they are that person.
Ex: Some people may see the
analyst as being like their father
or mother, they may treat the
analyst like they would their
father or mother.

23. Is transference good?
Some psychologists like transference because it helps clients to be comfortable expressing emotions about how they feel about a person.

24. Does Psychoanalysis help?
YES!
In a study of dozens of patients, People who received psychoanalysis showed improvement happened 70-75% more times than those that did not receive therapy.

25. When is Psychoanalysis especially helpful?
For people with anxiety, mile depression, and difficulty with social relationships.

26. When is psychoanalysis NOT very helpful?
For people with MAJOR Depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia.
Other problems with psychoanalysis: clients need to meet many times/week to be effective and this can be time consuming AND expensive.

27. Humanistic Therapy Goal: help individuals reach their full potential.
How: Become self-aware and accept yourself for who you are and what you want to do.
Therapists assume that people want to become all that they can be (Self Actualization).

28. What problems does Humanistic Therapy try to fix?
Helps people figure out what they can really do and helps them to reach their goals.

29. Most common type of Humanistic Therapy
Person Centered Therapy:
Idea: Problems happen when people stop being true to themselves and start acting how others want/expect them to act.
Therapy: is supposed to help clients find their true selves and realize their own unique potential.

30. How does Person Centered Therapy work?
Clients are seen as equals in a working relationship with their therapist instead of being seen as inferiors who are sick.
Clients are encouraged to lead the therapy session and talk about what is bothering them. Non-directive Therapy.

31. Non-directive Therapy
The therapist doesn’t lead.
Therapist’s role is to act as a mirror, reflecting back clients’ thoughts and feelings so clients can see themselves more clearly.

32. Techniques of person-centered therapy
Active Listening: The listener repeats, rephrases and asks for clarification of statements made by the speaker.
Goal: Show the speaker that they are being heard and understood.

33. Techniques of person-centered therapy
Listener is non-judgmental and supportive, regardless of what is being said.
This is called: unconditional positive regard.
This helps clients’ self esteem to rise and gives clients more confidence in the decisions they make.

34. Who uses person-centered therapy?
Person-centered therapy is used by school counselors a lot to help students deal with anxiety and to help them make decisions.
Ex: what college to go to.

35. Who does person-centered therapy help?
In a study, about 75% more people were helped after receiving person-centered therapy than those who received no therapy.
MOST useful for educated, motivated people.
Also helps people with anxiety, mild depression or problems with social relationships.
NOT HELPFUL for people with SERIOUS psychological problems.

36. Cognitive Therapy and Behavior Therapy
Goal: To help clients develop NEW ways of thinking and behaving.
Get rid of self-defeating thoughts (I’m not good at ANYTHING) and troubling behaviors (Smoking, lying etc).

37. Cognitive Therapy
Helps people to think about their problems in more productive ways.

38. Two most common cognitive/behavioral therapy methods:
1. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
2. Beck’s Cognitive Therapy

39. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
Based on the belief that people are basically logical in their thoughts and actions but the assumptions they base their thoughts or actions on are sometimes incorrect.

40. Example of a false assumption: “I MUST do EVERYTHING perfectly”
No one is perfect. People who believe that they have to do everything perfect to be happy also believe that if they are unhappy it is because they did something wrong.
No matter how hard you try you will never be able to live up to an unrealistically high standard of perfection.

41. Problem People are often unaware of their false assumptions.
Therapy is supposed to help people identify false assumptions and then challenge them.
Therapy teaches clients to think more realistically.

42. Techniques of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy:
1. role playing and modeling good, more realistic assumptions.
2. Clients are given homework to do things like readings, and experiments to test assumptions. The more students do their homework in the “real” world, the more likely they are to be successful with their therapy.

43. Beck’s Cognitive Therapy
Beck’s Cognitive Therapy concentrates on restructuring thought processes that may lead to emotional problems like depression.

44. Behavior Therapy
Goal: Help people to get rid of bad behaviors, like smoking or overeating AND/OR start doing good behavior, like eating right and exercising. OR helping people to get over a phobia.

45. Behavior Therapists
Don’t care why someone does bad behavior. They just want to help that person to CHANGE bad behavior.

46. Behavioral Techniques
Counter Conditioning
Operant Conditioning

47. Counter-conditioning
Training people to NOT do an undesirable behavior
Replace bad behavior with better behavior.

48. Techniques of counter-conditioning
Systematic Desensitization
Modeling
Aversive conditioning

49. Systematic Desensitization
Client is trained to relax in an anxiety producing situation.
Ex: If someone has a fear of spiders they might be systematically desensitized to spiders by being told to relax over and over after they were told to think about spiders until they no longer had anxiety when they heard the word….

50. Modeling
Client observes and imitates someone else dealing with a feared object in a healthy way.

51. Aversive Conditioning
Therapist replaces a positive response to doing something unhealthy, with a negative response.
Example: Smoking is a bad habit but it brings pleasure to a smoker.
The therapist tries to make smoking NOT pleasurable but doing something like making a smoker smoke 2 or more cigarettes at once.
Doing this many times may make a person associate smoking with displeasure and it can help them to quit smoking.

52. Operant Conditioning
Based on the idea that behavior that is reinforced (rewarded) will be repeated and behavior that is NOT reinforced will not be repeated.

53. Example: Speak English Campaign
Each time you are heard speaking English in the halls you get “money”.
The idea is that the more your English speaking is reinforced with getting money, the more you will speak English.
This is operant conditioning!

54. Another idea of Operant Conditioning
Successive Approximations: start small. If you have a goal of working out more start by working out for 20 min a day. If you go to the gym and try to run for an hour it’ll be too difficult and you’re likely to feel like your goal is hopeless.

55. Another example
Someone who has social anxiety might condition themselves to be more comfortable talking to people by just saying “hi” to one person. Eventually they can work up to having conversations but “hi” is a small step that they can do to start.

56. Does behavior therapy work?
Behavior Therapy tends to be more effective than psychoanalysis or person-centered therapy for disorders like:
Phobias, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Compulsions, mild depression, social problems, and self-control problems (drinking, smoking, overeating).

57. Does behavior therapy work?
It can also help people care for those with schizophrenia and mental retardation but DOES NOT TREAT THESE DISORDERS!

58. Biological Therapy
Relies on medication, electric shock and psycho surgery to affect the brain in some way to help treat psychological disorders.

59. Medical Treatments
Drug Therapy: Most widely used biological treatment. 4 major types of medication:
1. anti-anxiety drugs
2. antidepressant drugs
3. lithium
4. anti-psychotic drugs
All of these drugs require a prescription.

60. Anti-anxiety drugs Help people with panic attack or anxiety disorders.
Helps people with serious tension and stress in their lives.

61. Anti-anxiety drugs How do they work?
They lower heart rate and breathing. Decrease feelings of nervousness and tension.
NOT a permanent cure for anxiety disorders
ALSO drugs become LESS effective the more they are taken. So people start to need higher and higher does.
Side effects: fatigue and dependence

62. Anti-depressant Drugs
To treat depression and sometimes eating disorders and panic disorders.
What do they do?:
Basically, they help to increase chemicals and hormones in the brain that are linked to happiness.

63. Lithium
Helps people with Manic Depression (They have extreme happiness and excitement one moment and extreme depression or sadness the next.
How does it work: Lithium seems to flatten out the cycles for a more constant state instead of the extreme highs and lows.

64. Anti-psychotic drugs
Reduce agitation, delusions and hallucinations (believing/seeing/hearing things that aren’t really there)
Who do anti-psychotic drugshelp?
People with Schizophrenia

65. Electroconvulsive Therapy
Passes an electric shock through a patient’s head and produces convulsions.
It’s supposed to help people who do not respond to drug therapy.
It has helped many people.

66. Psychosurgery
Brain surgery to treat people with psychological disorders.
Example: Prefrontal Labotomy: is used to reduce agitation and violence in people with severe psychological disorders. VERY rare!

67. Let’s Review! Dr. Phil Movie: Psychotherapy and answer questions.
Types of Therapy Worksheet: use your notes and your book page 437.
Cinderella Therapy Packet