psychological therapy

• CBT -

  • period of 5-20 sessions
  • groups or individual
  • aims to deal with thoughts and behaviour
• how CBT helps -

  • helps client make sense of how their irrational cognitions.(delusions and hallucinations) impact on their feelings and behaviour
  • understanding where symptoms come from is helpful for symptoms like auditory hallucinations - if therapist convinces them the voices actually come from the malfunctioning speech centre in their own brain it is less scary and debilitating
  • won't eliminate symptoms but make people better able to cope with them
• how CBT helps -

  • normalisation - hearing voices can also be helped by teaching them that voice hearing is an extension of the ordinary experience of thinking in words
  • delusions can also be challenged - eg by process of reality testing - in cases where delusions are resistant to reality testing CBT can still be used to tackle the anxiety and depression
• family therapy -

  • takes place with families as well as the identified patient (one member of a dysfunctional family who expresses the family's conflicts)
  • aims to improve quality of communication and interaction between family members
  • range of approaches in keeping with psychological theories like the double-bind and the schizophrenogenic mother
• how family therapy helps -

  • pharaoh et al (2010) identified strategies family therapists use
  • reduces negative emotions - aims to reduce levels of expressed emotion - especially negative emotions such as anger and guilt which create stress - important to reduce likelihood of relapse
  • improves the families ability to help - therapist encourages family members to form therapeutic alliance where they all agree on aims of therapy - improves families beliefs about and behaviour towards schizophrenia - ensure family members achieve balance between caring for individual and maintaining own lives
• a model of practice -

  • Burback (2018)
  • phase 1 - sharing basic info and providing emotional and practical support
  • phase 2 - identifying resources including what different family members can/cant offer
  • phase 3 - encourage mutual understanding
  • phase 4 - identifying unhelpful patterns of interaction
  • phase 5 - skills training
  • phase 6 - relapse prevention planning
  • phase 7 - maintenance for future