Question

What is the view of psychopathology in the following therapies: client-centered, cognitive, exposure, insight, group, humanistic, and psychodynamic?

Answer 1

• Psychopathology occurs when various factors get in the way of people productively utilizing that capacity. Conditions of worth are a major factor. Conditions of worth are ubiquitous, not just occurring in early childhood. Client-centered therapy doesnt really have a psychopathology model,because person-centred therapists try to see their clients, first and foremost, as unique individuals, and not as representatives of a particular label; and it’s also true to say that person-centred therapists are as interested in their clients’ potentialities as they are in their problems.
• But, in recent years, numerous therapists within the person-centred field have attempted to understand severe psychological distress from a humanistic perspective.For instance, there is the work of Margaret Warner on ‘difficult’ and ‘fragile’ psychological processes.
• Cognitive behavior therapy is based on a cognitive theory of psychopathology. The cognitive model describes how people’s perceptions of, or spontaneous thoughts about, situations influence their emotional, behavioral reactions.
• Individuals’ perceptions are often distorted and dysfunctional when they are distressed. They can learn to identify and evaluate their “automatic thoughts” and to correct their thinking so that it more closely resembles reality. When they do so, their distress usually decreases, they are able to behave more functionally, and especially in anxiety cases, their physiological arousal abates.
• Individuals also learn to identify and modify their distorted beliefs: their basic understanding of themselves, their worlds, and other people. These distorted beliefs influence their processing of information, and give rise to their distorted thoughts. Thus, the cognitive model explains individuals’ emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses as mediated by their perceptions of experience, which are influenced by their beliefs and by their characteristic ways of interacting with the world, as well as by the experiences themselves.
• Therapists use a gentle Socratic questioning process to help patients evaluate and respond to their automatic thoughts and beliefs—and they also teach them to engage in this evaluation process themselves.
• Psychodynamic therapy is one of the approaches, which explains the dynamics of behaviour, and what motivates a person.The root of the abnormality is the effect of repression of unresolved conflicts between unconscious desires. The behaviour is motivated by unconscious desires. Conflict between needs is not resolved it may cause problems later e.g. phobia. Repression pushes distressing events into unconscious.
• The psychodynamic approach therapies drew attention to the psychological causes of mental disorder. Individuals with disorders often had traumatic events in childhood.According to the therapist,when you repress memories for too long and do not deal with them you can develop psychological disorders known as neurosis and these can manifest as panic attacks, phobias obsessive behaviour and this can affect normal day-to-day behaviour, which becomes neurotic behaviour.
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