APT - Treatment of Disorders Lesson

 

Treatment of Disorders

Most psychologists agree about the categorization and symptoms of mental disorders. However, opinions about the origin and treatment of disorders vary widely.

	Biomedical Perspective	Psychoanalytical Perspective	Cognitive Perspective	Behavioral Perspective
What makes people behave the way they do?	The genes they receive from their parents; hormones, neurotransmitters, and neural connections	The hidden drives in the unconscious mind	Thought processes and beliefs	Rewards and consequences in the environment
What causes disordered behavior?	Hormonal or neurotransmitter imbalances; genes inherited from parents	Repressed memories; regression to an earlier psychosexual stage; imbalance between id, ego, and superego	Irrational, dysfunctional thought processes	Being rewarded for disordered behavior
How should the disorder be treated?	Medicine	Talk therapy with a psychoanalyst, including free association, projective tests, and dream therapy to uncover the unconscious mind	Talk therapy to reveal and change irrational, dysfunctional thoughts	Teach new, more appropriate behaviors

Biomedical Therapy

Biomedical therapies attempt to alter body chemistry to treat psychological disorders. Most of the time they include the use of drugs or psychopharmacology.

Antipsychotic Drugs reduce dopamine levels because excessively high dopamine levels can lead to hallucinations.

Typical antipsychotics are effective against the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, have uncomfortable side effects, and can globally alter dopamine levels.

Atypical antipsychotics are newer drugs that may also be effective against the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, affect levels of serotonin in addition to dopamine, and have uncomfortable side effects.

Antianxiety drugs like Valium and Xanax depress nervous system activity in order to reduce excessive stress responses.

Antidepressants increase the neurotransmitters norepinephrine or serotonin, which can increase mood and energy levels.

Lithium is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder. It can interrupt acute manic attacks and prevent relapse. It is also very dangerous and must be closely monitored.

Electroconvulsive Therapy is a type of biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which brief electrical currents are sent through the brain of anesthetized patients in order to reset the emotional responses.  

Psychosurgery, which is almost never used in modern medicine, is a treatment in which parts of the brain are lesioned, destroyed, or removed in an effort to help alleviate suffering caused by psychological disorders. For a dark period of psychology's history the lobotomy was used to attempt to heal a myriad of psychological issues.

Aerobic exercise (at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise daily) is clinically shown to improve neurotransmitter levels and lead to improved mood and reduced anxiety.

Improved eating and sleeping habits (reduction of sugar and increase in hours of quality sleep) has also been proven to help with mood and anxiety.

Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapists follow Freud's theory about the importance of the unconscious mind. They focus on repressed memories, hidden selfish drives, and psychosexual stages. Using Freudian techniques like free association, projective tests, dream analysis, and sometimes hypnosis, these therapists attempt to uncover repressed memories or hidden urges. They believe that uncovering these hidden things in the unconscious mind will help the patient. Psychodynamic therapy is more commonly used for depression and anxiety disorders.

Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive therapists assume that faulty thinking is to blame for psychological problems. Depressed patients often have pessimistic explanatory styles, believing that problems will never end or failing to see that many parts of life are still good. Depression (or even anxiety) then, is not caused by external events and situations, but by the way the person thinks about the events. In cognitive therapy, patients and psychologists uncover faulty patterns of thinking and change them to more adaptive ways of thinking, focusing on optimism and healthy reactions.

Behavioral Therapy

Behaviorists believe that people are a product of their environments. Thus, behavioral therapy seeks to change behaviors through training new reactions to stimuli, which is called counterconditioning. The goal is to modify specific problem behaviors. The strategy for treatment deals with unlearning maladaptive behaviors by learning more adaptive ones. Behavioral therapy is most commonly used for anxiety disorders. For a person with a phobia, a behavioral therapy called exposure therapy would train the patient to remain calm while exposing them to increasing contact with the object of their fear. Some examples of exposure therapy include:

• systematic desensitization - a type of counterconditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli
• aversive conditioning - a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol)  

Eclectic Approach

Modern psychologists are well educated in a variety of therapies, and typically choose to use some methods from a variety of perspectives. The eclectic approach, using combinations of techniques from different perspectives, is the most popular form of therapy today. One example is cognitive-behavior therapy, which combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

Complete the therapy review activity below:

 

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