Treatment

• Systematic desensitisation

  • this is a behavioual therapy for treating anxiety disorders in which a client is gradually exposed to the threatening situation under relaxed condition until the anxiety reaction is extinguished.

  The CR in all phobias is fear. There are three steps to overcoming it:

  1. The client is taught relaxation techniques, such as breathing, mental imagery
  2. The client produces an anxiety hierarchy with the therapist (least to most anxious situation)
  3. Exposure to the phobic stimulus at the bottom and gradually moving up each time
• Treatments based on classical conditioning is known as a behavioural therapy. They work on the idea that if phobias are learnt through conditioning principles, they can be unlearnt through the same, which creates forms of counter conditioning.
• Flooding

  • this is a type of behavioural therapy where the patient is directly exposed to the fear stimulus.
  • the idea/reasoning behind this is that the patient will feel extreme levels of fear but this will reduce because the body cannot physically maintain such a high level of arousal
  • as adrenaline naturally decreases, the patient quickly learns that there is nothing to be fearful of
  • the assosciation between the stimulus and fear has been broken and a new assossciation between the fear object and calm is formed
• A03 - limitiation

  • this treatment raises ethical issues as both can be psychologically harmful, though cost benefit analyses may regard long term benefits of eradicating the phobia as outweighing the short term costs of distress
• A03- Supporting Evidence

  • Mary Jones, study of little Peter
  • suggests that phobias can be unlearnt
  • a boy's phobia of white fluffy animals was counterconditioned
  • the rabbit was presented at close distances each time his anxiety levels subsided and he was rewarded with food to develop a positive assosciation with the rabbit, which generalised to similar animals and object
  • thus supporting the idea that systematic desensitisation is a useful treatment for phobias
• A03 - limitation

  • very dependent on the person, i.e. may not work for all
  • patients who are able to learn and use relaxation strategies are more likely to be suitable for systematic desensitisation
  • some patients who are not in good physical health are not suitable for flooding; the extreme anxiety levels can be very stressful on the body and raise the risk of heart attacks
• A03 - alternative treatment

  • a more ethical version of systematic desensitisation is covert sensitisation, which uses imagery
  • no guarantee that patients who can gradually confront phobias in an imaginary sense will be able to do so with the actual objects/ situations in vivo treatment to be superior
• A03 - other approaches

  • psychoanalysis
  • gets to the root of the problem
  • a traumatic event may be the reason for the phobia and this can be locked away in the unconscious mind and manifest as a phobia
  • psychodynamic approach is critical of behavioural as they think that the phobia is a symptom of a deeper problem and if the symptoms are changed then the anxiety within will manifest itself in another way