Warm Up
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Explain the difference between psychological
and biomedical therapy?
How would a psychoanalytic therapist treat
someone?
How would a Humanistic therapist treat
someone?
How would a behaviorist therapist treat
someone?
What is the difference between systematic
desensitization and flooding?
List 2 difference between the psychoanalytic
perspective and behavioral
How could a token economy help someone with
an anxiety disorder?
Warm Up

Pick up both sheets off of the overhead
Chapter 17 pt. 2: Cognitive and
Biomedical Therapy
The Most Dominant Therapy is the
Cognitive Approach
Assumption and Goal of
Cognitive Therapy
Cognitive Therapy assumes that
thoughts exist between events and
responses. A person’s response
depends on how they interpret the
situation.
 Goal of Cognitive therapy is to
teach people new and more realistic,
helpful, and adaptive patterns of
thinking and acting.
 Want to See glass half-full instead of
half-empty!!

Negative Thought Patterns
(Cognition) Leads to Depression
Lost job
Internal beliefs:
I’m worthless.
It’s hopeless.
Depression
Lost job
Internal beliefs:
My boss is a jerk.
I deserve something better.
No
depression
Aaron Beck’s Views on
Depression (NOT IN BOOK)
Beck believed the key to understanding
depression was in an individual’s
thought patterns.
 Argued depressed people’s negative
thought patterns and creation of
negative schemas caused them to
misinterpret the world which often
caused them to feel worthless and
incompetent.
 Depressed people tend to view world
with “dark sunglasses.”

Beck’s Examples of Negative
Schemas (NOT IN BOOK)
 Arbitrary
Interference: drawing
negative conclusions from an event
without any evidence.
 Ex: After an argument thinking “that
person hates me.”
 Dichotomous Thinking: irrational all or
nothing thinking.
 Ex: “I can’t be happy unless everyone
likes me.”
Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive
Therapy (NOT IN BOOK)
 Albert
Ellis also believed that people’s
maladaptive thoughts led to maladaptive
emotional responses.
 He promoted a form of treatment known
as Rational Emotive Therapy: involves
getting patients to recognize the
irrationalities within their thought patterns
and helping them create healthier forms
of thinking and behaving.
Rational Emotive Therapy is a Form of
Cognitive-Behavior Therapy
 Cognitive-Behavior
Therapy: aims
to alter the way people think (ex:
irrational thought patterns) and act
(ex: compulsions).
Effectiveness of Cognitive
Therapy
Nearly all Psychotherapies can be
Conducted as Group Therapies
 Less costly and time consuming therapy is
often effective b/c it helps people see that
they are not alone in their problem.
 Family Therapy: assumes no person is
an island and that we grow in relation to
our families but we also seek to
differentiate from them which leads to
friction.
 Therapy focuses on maintaining healthy
relationships.
Effectiveness of Psychotherapy?
How do We Evaluate?
 Is it therapy that helps people get
better or would it occur naturally?
 Regression towards the Mean:
the tendency for unusual emotions
(depression/sadness) or events to
return (regress) toward their
average state with time.
Effectiveness of Psychotherapy?
How do We Evaluate?
 In
order to test impact of treated vs.
untreated, studies using metaanalysis must be used.
 Meta-analysis: procedure for
statistically combining the results of
many different research studies.
Meta-analysis Illustrates
Success of Psychotherapy
Which Therapies work for which
problems
There is no “best” therapy
 No difference between group and ind.
 Cognitive and behavior therapydepression
 Cognitive, exposure- Anxiety
 Cognitive and behavior- Bulimia
 Behavior modification- bed wetting
 Behavior- phobias, OCD

Alternative Therapy

1. Therapeutic Touch
– No human energy field
 2.
Eye Movement Desensitization
and Reprocessing
– Maybe
– But… probably….
 1. Placebo and reliving trauma
 3.
Light Exposure
– Good for SAD
Who Conducts Therapy?
Who Conducts Therapy?
 Clinical
psychologists
–Most are psychologists with a Ph.D.
and expertise in research, assessment,
and therapy, supplemented by a
supervised internship.
–About half work in agencies and
institutions, half in private practice.
Who Conducts Therapy?
 Clinical
or Psychiatric social worker
–A two-year Master of Social Work
graduate program plus postgraduate
supervision prepares some social
workers to offer psychotherapy, mostly
to people with everyday personal and
family problems.
–About half have earned the National
Association of Social Workers’
designation of clinical social worker.
Who Conducts Therapy?
 Counselors
–Marriage and family counselors
specialize in problems arising from
family relations.
–Pastoral counselors provide
counseling to countless people.
–Abuse counselors work with
substance abusers and with spouse
and child abusers and their victims.
Who Conducts Therapy?
 Psychiatrists
–Physicians who specialize in the
treatment of psychological
disorders.
–Not all psychiatrists have had
extensive training in psychotherapy,
but as M.D.s they can prescribe
medications. Thus, they tend to see
those with the most serious problems.
–Many have a private practice.
Therapies outside of
Psychotherapy Are Often
Biomedical
 The
biomedical perspective
focuses on altering body
chemistry.
 Biomedical perspective is
rooted in discoveries of
psychopharmacology:
study of the effect of drugs
on the mind and
behavior.
Social Effects of Drug
Treatments
State and county
mental hospital 700
residents, in
600
thousands
500
Introduction of antipsychotic drugs
Rapid decline
in the mental
hospital
population
400
300
200
100
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Year
Drug Treatments:
Antipsychotics
 Antipsychotics
are used to treat
psychotic disorders like schizophrenia.
 Antipsychotics helps those experiencing
both positive and negative symptoms.
 Most Common Examples:
–Thorazine: alleviates
delusions/hallucinations.
–Clozaril: alleviates negative symptoms
and social withdrawal.
Drug Treatments:
Anxiolytics (Anti-Anxiety)
 Anti-Anxiety
drugs depress nervous
system activity.
 Often most heavily abused
prescription drug.
 Most common examples are:
–Valium
–Librium
–Xanax
Drug Treatments:
Anti-depressants
 Most
anti-depressants increase the
availability of norepinephrine and
serotonin which elevates arousal and
mood.
 Most common examples are:
–Prozac
–Zoloft
–Paxil
Drug Treatments:
Bipolar Disorder
 The
salt lithium is most
frequently used to treat
the mood swings of
bipolar disorder.
 Decreases adrenaline
and increases
serotonin.
Electroconvulsive Therapy
(ECT)
 Electroconvulsive
Therapy: used to
treat the severely
depressed after other
treatments have failed.
 Success rate is high.
 Side effects can
include some
memory loss.
Psychosurgery is Most Drastic
Intervention
 Psychosurgery
involves removing or
destroying brain tissue in an effort to
change behavior.
 Best known procedure is a lobotomy:
Ice pick like instrument is put through the
eye sockets cutting the links between the
frontal lobes and the emotional control
centers. Used to be used to “cure”
uncontrollably violent patients but
now very rare.
Lobotomy
