THE TREATMENT OF MENTAL

DISORDERS/PSYCHOTHERAPIES
PSYCHOTHERAPY:
The procedure of treatment of a mental disorder is called Psychotherapy. It is a
process in which a professional makes attempt to remedy the client’s psychological
difficulties.

A) PSYCHOANALYSIS:
Sigmund Freud is given credit for developing psychoanalysis, a form of therapy
aimed at providing the client insight into his or her unconsciousness motivations and
impulses.

Psychoanalysis assumes that the past experiences cause current psychological

problems. The purpose of therapy is to create a setting in which clues about the origins of
intrapsychic conflicts are most likely to be revealed by the client. These clues are
revealed in the client’s dreams, physical problems, memory, and manner of speech and
emotional relations of therapy. Then, by exposing the client to the clues, he or she will
gain insight to the problem.
While the psychoanalyst’s primary role is interpretation, the client’s main job is to
provide the psychoanalyst something to interpret: descriptions of his or her fears,
anxieties, thoughts, or repressed memories.

PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUES:
i. FREE ASSOCIATION:
A psychoanalytic procedure in which the client is encouraged to speak
freely, without censoring possibly embarrassing or socially unacceptable thoughts
or ideas.
Psychoanalyst achieves his goal in two ways. First, the client was encouraged to
report any thoughts or images that came to mind, without worrying about their
meanings. Second, he or she attempts to minimize any convincing influence over
the client’s disclosure by eliminating eye contact.
Free association actually represents important clues to the unconsciousness,
which has its own logic. It is the analyst’s job to recognize and label the
connection between what is being said and the patient’s unconsciousness.

ii. DREAM INTERPRETATION:

Patient’s dreams are examined to find clues to the unconsciousness
conflicts and problems being experienced. Dream Interpretation, the evaluation of
the underlying meaning of dream content. Freud says dreams provide close look
at the unconsciousness because people defenses tend to be lowered when they are
asleep.

iii. RESISTANCE:

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 The client often becomes defensive at some point during therapy,
unconsciously attempting to halt further insight by censoring his/her feelings, a
process called resistance. Furthermore, since these unconscious memories are
painful, the client is likely to use defense mechanisms to resist discovering these
painful past experiences.
A psychoanalyst may conclude that resistance is operating when the client tries to
change the topic, begins to miss appointments for therapy, or suddenly forgets
what he/she was about to say. The skilled therapist, who is not burdened by the
clients’ resistance, recognizes such diversions and redirects the discussion to the
sensitive topics while minimizing the pain of rediscovery.

iv. TRANSFERENCE:
The process by which a client begins to projects powerful attitudes and
emotions onto the therapist.
Over a period of months or even years of therapy, sessions taking place as often as
several times a week, the client gradually becomes less inhabited, and the
discussion begins to drift away from recent events to the more distant shores of
early childhood. The client may come to love or hate the therapist with the same
intensity of the powerful emoticons experienced in childhood towards parents or
siblings.

v. COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE:
The process by which the therapist projects his/her emoticons onto the
client.
Unlike transference, Freud believed Counter-Transference to be unhealthy and
undesirable. To be effective, the analyst must remain, emotionally detached and
objective in his/her appraisal of the client’s disclosures.

B) GESTALT THERAPIES:
A form of therapy emphasizing the unity of mind and body by teaching the client
to “get in touch” with unconscious bodily sensations and emotional feelings.

Gestalt therapy places exclusive emphasize upon present experience — not on the
past — and the gestalt therapist will often be quiet confrontive, challenging the client to
deal honestly with his/her emoticons. In Gestalt therapy the therapist will often have the
client adopt the perspective of some person or even some object in the dream in an
empathic manner.

GESTALT THERAPY TECHNIQUES:

i. EMPTY CHAIR TECHNIQUE:
Therapists often use the Empty Chair Technique, in which the client
imaging that he/she is talking to someone sitting in the chair beside him/her.
For Example: A woman may be asked to say the thing that she always wanted to
say to her deceased father but didn’t while he was alive. The Empty Chair

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 Technique allows her to experience in the here and now the feelings and
perceptions that she may have suppressed while her father was alive. It also
allows her to express these feeling and to gain insight into how these feelings
have influenced her perception of herself and her world.

ii. SELF TALKING:

The gestalt therapist also encourages the client to gain a better
understanding of his/her feelings by talking to his or herself and to intimate
objects. Any attempts by client to avoid the reality of his/her situation is
challenged by the therapist, who constantly attempts to keep the clients’ for
attention focused on present problems and tries to guide the client toward an
honest confrontation with these problems.

C) HUMANISTIC THERAPIES:
A form of therapy focusing on the person’s unique potential for personal growth
and self-actualization.

Humanistic Therapies proceeds from assumptions that people are good and have
innate worth. Psychological problems reflect some type of blocking of one’s potential for
personal growth; Humanistic Therapy is aimed at realizing this potential. A major form of
Humanistic Therapy is called Client-Centered Therapy.

CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY:
A form of therapy in which the client is allowed to decide what to talk
about without strong direction and judgment from the therapist.
The client takes ultimate responsibility for resolving his/her problems. The client
not a method or theory is the focus of the therapy.
Rogers (father of Client-Centered Therapy) believed that the cause of many
psychological problems can be traced to people’s perceptions of themselves as
they actually are as differing from the people they would like to be. Rogers called
this discrepancy between the real and ideal perceptions of the self incongruence.
The goal of the Client-Centered Therapy is to reduce incongruence by forecasting
experience that will make attainment of the ideal self possible.
In Client-Centered Therapy, the therapist totally and unconditionally accepts the
client and approves of him/her as a person so that the client can come to
understand that his/her feelings are worthwhile and important. Once the client
begins to pay attentions to these feelings, a self-healing process begins.
For Example: A client usually has difficulty at first experiencing feelings verbally.
The therapist tries to understand the feelings underlying the client’s confused state
and to help him/her put them into words. Through this process the client learns to
understand and heeds his/her own drive toward self-actualization.

D) BEHAVIORAL THERAPIES:

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 Approaches to treating abnormal behavior that assumes both normal and
abnormal behaviors and the appropriate treatment consists of learning new behaviors or
unlearning faulty behaviors.

The methods that behavior therapists use to induce behavior changes are
extensions of classical and operant conditioning principles.

THERAPIES BASED ON CLASSICAL CONDITIONING:

SYSTEMATIC DESENSITIZATION:
A method of treatment in which the client is trained to relax in the
presence of increasingly fearful stimuli.
This technique is designed to remove the unpleasant emotional response produced
by feared object or situation and replace in with an incompatible — relaxation.
• The client is first trained to achieve complete relaxation.
• The essential task is to learn to respond quickly to suggestions to feel
relaxed and peaceful so that these suggestions can elicit an immediate
relaxation response.
• Next, client and therapist construct a hierarchy of anxiety-related stimuli.
• Finally, the conditional stimuli are paired with stimuli that elicit the
learned relaxation restructured to relax.
• Several trials of relaxing while imagining the anxiety situation may be
needed until the situation triggers a relaxation response instead of an
anxiety response.
• Eventually, the client will practice relaxation techniques in the real
situations until there are no more anxiety responses in those situations.

THERAPIES BASED ON OPERANT CONDITIONING:

i. TOKEN ECONOMIES:
A program often used in institutions in which a person’s adaptive behavior
is reinforced with tokens that are exchangeable for desirable goods or special
privileges.
In this process, behavioral therapists assign some tasks to their clients and on the
completion of tasks, clients receive tokens as reward for performing the tasks;
later they can exchange these tokens for snacks, other desirable articles, or various
privileges.

ii. MODELING:
A method in which a client learns by watching others behavior and the
consequences of their behavior.
Humans have the ability to learn without directly experiencing an event. People
can imitate the behavior of other people, watching what they do and, if the
conditions are appropriate, performing the same behavior. This capability
provides the basis for the technique of Modeling.

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E) COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOR THERAPIES:
A treatment method that focuses on altering the client’s thoughts, beliefs and
perceptions.

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that whatever you think will determine the
way you feel. The cognitive therapy helps people to recognize and deal with upsetting
thoughts. The main cause of upsetting thoughts is negative thoughts about oneself. This
includes:

• SELF BLAME:
It is the belief that everything that goes wrong is the person’s own fault.
• OVERGENERALIZATION:
It is extending the belief that a person cannot do anything, relating one failure
with another. For example if a person fails in Mathematics, he may think he
will fail in all subjects, be kicked out of school or fail in his whole life.
• EXTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL:
It is the belief that a person cannot do anything; everything is done by a
person’s fate or destiny. If this belief is exaggerated, a person may fall into a
pattern of learned helplessness, where a person feels helpless and hopeless.

RATIONAL-EMOTIVE THERAPY:
Therapy based on the belief that psychological problems are caused not by
upsetting events but by how people think about them.
Albert Ellis (father of Rational-Emotive Therapy) asserts that psychological
problems are the result of faulty cognitions; therapy is therefore aimed at
changing people’s beliefs. Rational-Emotive Therapy is highly directive and
confrontational. The therapist tells his/her clients what they are doing wrong and
how they should change.
According to Ellis, emotions are the products of cognition. A significant
activating event (A) is followed by a highly charged emotional consequence (C),
but it is not correct to say that A has caused C. Rather, C is a result of the person’s
belief system (B). Therefore, inappropriate emotions (such as depression, guilt,
and anxiety) can be abolished only if a change occurs in the person’s belief
system.