Download Other therapies

Other therapies
What other ways (besides drugs) can
be used to treat people?
Somatic (physical) therapies
• Psychosurgery
– Essentially a brain operation designed to
mitigate the effects of a disorder
• Frontal lobotomy is the most famous example
• Cutting the corpus collosum in epilepsy patients
• Electroshock therapy
– Essentially works on the same principle as
operant conditioning
Psychotherapy
• Psychoanalysis
– Psychological problems are caused by conflicts
between the three components of the psyche
– These conflicts are caused by anxiety over
childhood behaviors
– Patients need to confront and face this anxiety
so they can let go of these conflicts.
Behavior Therapy
• Starts from the principle that psychological
problems are the result of some sort of
maladaptive learning.
• In other words, we have learned to have bad habits
- thoughts, behaviors, whatever.
• To treat the person, we need to retrain the mind.
–
–
–
–
Flooding
Implosion
Systematic desensitization
Aversion therapy
Cognitive Therapy
• Derives from the concept of cognitive dissonance.
• The idea is that psychological problems stem from
contradictions in what people believe about the
world.
• The maladaptive behaviors that are adopted are
designed to help resolve these contradicitons.
• To treat the patient, they need to be confronted
with the contradictions and helped to sort them
out.
Humanistic Therapy
• Humanistic psychologists believe that
psychology has become too “mechanical.”
• The believe that the person is more than just
an automaton reaction to environmental
stimuli.
• Thus, we cannot focus on just the subset of
behaviors a person might have that are
maladaptive. We need to focus on treating
and healing the whole person.