Chapter 5

• Psychotherapy is a voluntary relationship between the one seeking treatment or the client and the one who treats or the therapist.
• The purpose of the relationship is to help the client to solve the psychological problems being faced by her or him.
• The relationship is conducive for building the trust of the client so that problems may be freely discussed.
• Psychotherapies aim at changing the maladaptive behaviours, decreasing the sense of personal distress, and helping the client to adapt better to her/his environment.
• Role-play and dramatisation of certain student-related behavioural issues, such as break-up of relationship with a friend, can evoke interest among students and emphasise the application of psychology.
• Therapy is a highly skilled process requiring professional training, and students should be refrained from treating it in a frivolous manner.
• Any activity or discussion that may have a serious impact on the psyche of the students should be properly transacted in the presence of the teacher.
• Inadequate marital, occupational and social adjustment also requires that major changes be made in an individual’s personal environment.
• All psychotherapeutic approaches have the following characteristics: there is systematic application of principles underlying the different theories of therapy, persons who have received practical training under expert supervision can practice psychotherapy, and not everybody.
• In the preceding chapter, you have studied about major psychological disorders and the distress caused by them to the patient and others.
• In this chapter, you will learn about the various therapeutic methods that are used by psychotherapists to help their patients.
• In occupational therapy, the patients are taught skills such as candle making, paper bag making and weaving to help them to form a work discipline.
• After the patient improves sufficiently, vocational training is given wherein the patient is helped to gain skills necessary to undertake productive employment.
• The aim of rehabilitation is to empower the patient to become a productive member of society to the extent possible.
• Rehabilitation is required to help such patients become self-sufficient.
• The objective of social skills training is to teach the patient to function in a social group.
• Cognitive retraining is given to improve the basic cognitive functions of attention, memory and executive functions.
• Social skills training helps the patients to develop interpersonal skills through role play, imitation and instruction.
• Many patients suffer from negative symptoms such as disinterest and lack of motivation to do work or to interact with people.
• In rehabilitation, the patients are given occupational therapy, social skills training, and vocational therapy.
• There are various types of psychotherapy, some of them focus on acquiring self-understanding; other therapies are more action-oriented.
• All approaches hinge on the basic issue of helping the patient overcome her/his debilitating condition.
• The effectiveness of a therapeutic approach for a patient depends on a number of factors such as severity of the disorder, degree of distress faced by others, and the availability of time, effort and money, among others.
• All therapeutic approaches are corrective and helping in nature.
• All of them involve an interpersonal relationship between the therapist and the client or patient.
• Some of them are directive in nature, such as psychodynamic, while some are non-directive such as person-centred.
• In this chapter, we will briefly discuss some of the major forms of psychotherapy.
• An untrained person may unintentionally cause more harm than any good, (iii) the therapeutic situation involves a therapist and a client who seeks and receives help for her/his emotional problems (this person is the focus of attention in the therapeutic process), and (iv) the interaction of these two persons — the therapist and the client — results in the consolidation/formation of the therapeutic relationship.
• This is a confidential, interpersonal, and dynamic relationship.
• Behavioural analysis conducted by interviewing the client and the family members reveals that the person started smoking when he was preparing for the annual examination.
• Treatment of phobias or excessive and crippling fears would require the use of one set of techniques while that of anger outbursts would require another.
• The first one or two sessions yield enough clinical material for the initial clinical formulation.
• The client with psychological distress or with physical symptoms, which cannot be attributed to physical disease, is interviewed with a view to analyse her/ his behaviour patterns.
• Behaviour therapy consists of a large set of specific techniques and interventions.
• The target areas for psychotherapy are inability to assert oneself and heightened anxiety.
• Once the faulty behaviours which cause distress, have been identified, a treatment package is chosen.
• Antecedent factors are those causes which predispose the person to indulge in that behaviour.
• The feeling of relief becomes the maintaining factor for him to continue smoking.
• Behavioural analysis is conducted to find malfunctioning behaviours, the antecedents of faulty learning, and the factors that maintain or continue faulty learning.
• The clinical formulation is an ongoing process that may require reformulations as clinical insights are gained in the process of therapy.