Chapter 14 Entry

In the last Chapter, we discussed psychological disorders and how they are diagnosed.  After being exposed the various disorders that many people face, I wondered how the people with these disorders go about getting help.  To my luck, Chapter 14 discussed the various ways people receive may help from professionals. A commonly known solution to people with psychological disorders is psychotherapy, which is a treatment involving psychological techniques between a trained therapist and someone that is seeking to overcome personal growth.  Chapter 13 also discussed the many techniques such as psychoanalytic, behavioral, and cognitive.

 The behavioral therapies stood out to me the most! Behavioral therapy consists of learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. Within behavior therapy is counterconditioning, which is a procedure that uses classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors.  One form of counterconditioning is exposure therapies, which I found very interesting.  Exposure therapy is when anxieties are treated by exposing people to things they fear.  I found this rather interesting because this was the same technique that was commonly used on the Maury Povitch show.  He would often have a segment when people would come on the show with weird phobias.  Whether it was a fear of birds, frogs, or even jello, these people would come to the show for help.  The starts off with the wrong step which if flooding.  This is when person is bombarded by they object they are afraid of. After much foolishness, they finally go to the therapist for professional help.  The therapist would often use the exposure technique by first showing them a picture.  They would later progress to getting the object into the room and gradually move toward the patient.  They eventually move toward the step of being able to hold the object that they are afraid of.