Psychological treatments

• cognitive behaviour therapies


  cbt is a type of therapy that can take place between 5-20 sessions and works by identifying irrational beliefs and changing them. involves a argument of how likely to delusions are. doesnt get rid of symptoms only helps the patient cope with them
• how CBT works


  works by making patients making sense of their delusions, letting them know they are not apart of reality ( challenging them) eg if a schizo sufferer hears voices and claims they are the demon, they would be scared but CBT makes the sufferer aware that its not the demon which reduces anxiety and reduces the effects of the symptom.
• family therapy


  Pharaoh takes place with the families and the sufferer rather than the patient alone. bases on the schizophrenic mother, double blind and expressed emotion. aims to improve communication and reducing stress,

  forming therapeutic relationships

  improving ability to solve problems

  improving beliefs about schizo

  teach how to care but also maintain own life.

  theese increase the chance of patients complying with medication and reduces relapses
• token economy


  used in psychiatric hospitals to stop bad habits, eg poor hygiene, an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behaviour and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.
• A03 - Evidence for effectiveness CBT

  Jahar showed there is weak evidence for CBT helping as he showed there was only a small effect of both positive and negative symptoms of 34 previous studies on CBT.
• A03: family therapy


  Pharaoh suggested that there is weak evidence to family therapy to helps as there was little evidence showing reduced hospital rates and different studies showed inconsistent findings
• A03: token economy


  found only 3 studies where patients had been randomly allocated to conditions with only a total of 110 patients. and only one of these studies showed a improvement in symptoms and none gave useful information
• A03: treatments improve quality of life but no cure

  all types of therapies only help the symptoms be more manageable, CBT helps cope, family therapy helps reduce stress and token economy helps suffers symptoms be more manageable in society. this is a weakness agaisnt biological treatments as they reduce the severity of the condition. and failure to cure schizo is a weakness
• A03: ethical issues


  token economy has seen to be controversial. this is due to privileges being only awarded to those with milder symptoms and therefore those with worse symptoms get left out and suffer with discrimination as there symptoms make then unable to complete desirable behaviours, but they are also not being treated to help their symptoms

  also CBT interferes with the individuals freedom of thought which could be used by the government to control society