Psychotherapy
Psychological intervention designed to help people resolve emotional, behavioural, and interpersonal problems and improve the quality of their lives.
Paraprofessionals
Helpers who have no formal professional training, often provide psychological services in such settings as crisis intervention centres and other social service agencies.
Psychodynamic Therapies
Treatments inspired by classical psychoanalysis and influenced by Freud’s techniques. It is less costly, briefer (weeks or months or open-ended) and involves meeting only once or twice per week.
Insight Therapies
Psychodynamic therapies and the humanistic therapies have the same goal to cultivate insight - that is, expanded awareness.
Humanistic Therapies
A variety of approaches rooted in the humanistic perspective on personality. Therapies within this orientation share an emphasis on insight, self-actualization, and the belief that human nature is basically positive. They strive to understand their client’s inner worlds through empathy and focus on the client’s thoughts and feelings in the present moment.
Psychoanalysis
Its goal is to decrease guilt and frustration and make the unconscious conscious by bringing to awareness previously repressed impulses, conflicts, and memories.
Free Association
As clients lie on a couch in a comfortable position, therapists instruct them to say whatever thoughts come to mind, no matter how meaningless or nonsensical they might seem. Clients are permitted to express themselves without censorship.
Interpretation
From the free association, analysts form hypotheses regarding the origin of the client’s difficulties and share them with the client as the therapeutic relationship evolves. They form interpretations - explanations - of the unconscious bases of a client’s dreams, emotions, and behavior.
Dream Analysis
The therapist’s task is to interpret the relation of the dream to the client’s waking life and the dream’s symbolic significance.
Resistance
Avoiding further confrontation. ex. skipping therapy
Transference
They project intense, unrealistic feelings and expectations from their past onto the therapist.
Working Through
Therapists help clients work through, or process, their problems.
Participant Observer
Analyst’s proper role. Through their ongoing observations, the analyst discovers and communicates to clients their unrealistic attitudes and behaviours in everyday life.
Interpersonal Therapy
Originally a treatment for depression, IPT is a short-term intervention designed to strengthen people’s social skills and assist them in coping with interpersonal problems, conflicts, and life transitions.
Person-Centered Therapy
Therapists don’t tell clients how to solve their problems, and clients can use therapy hours however they choose.
Motivational Interviewing
Two session procedure recognizes that many clients are ambivalent about changing long-standing behaviors and is geared toward clarifying and bringing forth their reason for changing - and not changing - their lives.
Gestalt Therapy
Emphasizes a person’s present life and current challenges rather than focusing on past experiences.
Two Chair Technique
Gestalt therapists ask clients to move from chair to chair, creating a dialogue with two conflicting aspects of their personalities.
Group Therapy
Treating more than one person at a time (3 to as many as 20 people) group therapy is efficient, time saving, and less costly than individual treatments and span all major schools of psychotherapy.
Self-Help Groups
To share a similar problem; often they don’t include a professional mental health specialist.
Alcoholics Anonymous
Founded in 1933 and is now the largest organization for treating people with alcoholism, with more than 2.1 million members worldwide.
Relapse Prevention
Treatment assumes that many people with alcoholism will at some point experience a lapse, or slip, and resume drinking. RP teaches people to not feel ashamed, guilty, or discouraged when they lapse.
Abstinence Violation Effect
Once someone slips up, they figure, “Well, I guess I’m back to drinking again,” and go back to drinking at high levels.
Family Therapy
The patient or the focus of treatment isn’t one person, but rather the family unit itself. Family therapists therefore focus on interactions among family members.
