Psychotherapy
In today’s society, sexual abuse, suicide, and domestic issues run rampant. People have problems in their lives that are not easy to get ride of. They need help, and there is one main way of accomplishing this help. It is through psychotherapy. People need psychotherapy as the center of treatment for emotional and mental disorders. Many people claim psychotherapy and prove it effective with five properties that characterize it. Different techniques are used for psychotherapy studies, some have flaws and rebuttals. Disease and psychotherapy go hand in hand, and there are therapeutic sections that go with it.
“The term psychotherapist is unlicensed: anyone… can call himself a psychotherapist. The same applies to the term therapist. Psychologist, psychiatrist, and certified social workers, on the other hand, require some kind of licensure. The practitioner can not call himself by these titles unless he has met certain state and national requirements” (Credentials). Many people that are considered psychotherapists, but their practices are not the same. Some have a higher education than others. A psychiatrist is considered a psychotherapist. Few of these doctors go to a psychoanalytic institute, but they go to college for about eight years. They specialize in medicine, so they are able to prescribe drugs. They usually have additional training in psychology. The state examining board gives both a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist their license. If the state-level exams are not passed, the doctors can not legally call themselves psychologists (Nelson). A psychoanalyst is also considered a psychotherapist. These doctors go to an analytic institute. Some institutions accept people with little or no background in the field (Credentials 2). Psychologists have a Ph.D. and some have a Psy.D. in psychology. “Masters level psychologists are not addressed as doctor and have only about two years of graduate training” (Credentials 2). Social workers are another group of people that are considered psychotherapists. A Licensed Clinical Worker “usually has two years of graduate training with an emphasis on psychotherapy, an internship also emphasizing psychotherapy, and a year or two of supervised post-graduate work before obtaining the license” (Credentials 2). If they have a master’s degree (M.S.W.), they have about six years of college education with courses in counseling (Nelson). “Among the most common errors made by therapists of limited training and experience is that of overlooking alternatives. Nobody would want to be seeing a narrowly trained, narrowly focused therapist about depression if in truth they were suffering nutritional deficits, sleep deprivation, even neuralgic damage, attention deficit, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, all of which can mimic depression” (Credentials 2).
Psychotherapy is needed for a number of different reasons. Some people have emotional problems, and others may have mental problems. One problem may be that they can not get help anywhere else. Although some people may feel that books and workshops may help, that is not so for everyone. There are many self-improvement books, and magazine articles that are found helpful, but they may not always work. “Some peoples lives have been transformed by listening to talk or lectures,” others may have changed with religious help from their priest, or minister. Some people talk to their family members, and their jobs may even have a company program with counselors to talk to. Support groups are also available. They allow them to talk to different people with problems similar to theirs. Reducing stress is a major help. “Many people have lessened their fears, crises, and problems by taking a vacation, learning yoga, exercising, getting professional therapeutic massages, or even just concentrating on doing better at work” (Nelson). These suggestions may not help with everyone, but for some people it is a life saver. Psychotherapists are specially trained to be able to help people with their problems, unlike family members and friends. Although they can give you some options, they can not give you all of the options. “Therapists are professionally trained in listening, communicating, and assisting people in getting what they want and need.” They do not lecture people, and will not get angry or frustrated with them. “Therapists help people learn to express their feelings safely… and face the difficulties in life with resources they did not know they had.” People that usually need psychotherapy know they have a problem, but may not know how to locate a therapist, or they may be ashamed. They feel alone with their feelings, and sometimes do not know how to express them. Therapy can help overcome fears, it helps to give to ones self, and to receive what is needed from others (Nelson).
Psychotherapy is effective to a majority of the people that experience it. The efficacy study and the effectiveness study are two methods used to find out if psychotherapy works. The most popular way is through an efficacy study. “It contrasts some kind of therapy to a comparison group under well-controlled conditions” (Seligman 1). Eight steps must be followed. In the first step, the patients are randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. In the second step “The controls are rigorous: Not only are patients included who receive no treatment at all, but placebos containing potentially therapeutic ingredients credible to both the patient and the therapist are used in order to control for such influences as rapport, expectation of gain, and sympathetic attention.” In the third step “the treatments are manualized, with highly detailed scripting of therapy made explicit. Fidelity to the manual is assessed using videotaped sessions, and wayward implementers are corrected.” In the fourth step, the patients are seen for a certain amount of sessions. In the fifth step the targets of the outcomes are well operationalized, like reported panic attacks and the percentage of fluent utterances. In the sixth step, “raters and diagnosticians are blind to which group the patient comes from.” In the seventh step, “the patients meet criteria for a single diagnosed disorder, and patients with multiple disorders are typically excluded.” In the eighth step “the patients are followed for a fixed period after termination of treatment with a thorough assessment battery.”
“So when an efficacy study demonstrates a difference between a form of psychotherapy and controls, academic clinicians and researcher take this modality seriously indeed. In spite of how expensive and time-consuming they are, hundreds of efficacy studies of both psychotherapy and drugs now exist many of them well done. These studies show, among many other things, that cognitive therapy, interpersonal therapy, and medications all provide moderate relief from unipolar depressive disorder; that exposure and clomipramine both relieve the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder moderately well but that exposure has more lasting benefits; that cognitive therapy works very well in panic disorder; that systematic desensitization relieves specific phobias; that applied tension virtually cures blood and injury phobia; that transcendental meditation relieves anxiety; that aversion therapy produces only marginal improvement with sexual offenders; that disulfram does not provide lasting relief from alcoholism; that flooding plus medication does better in the treatment of agoraphobia than either alone; and that cognitive therapy provides significant relief of bulimia, outperforming medications alone” (Seligman 2).