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 selftalk.
 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 selfcritical 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.