Outline and evaluate two psychological therapies for treating abnormality

To evaluate, psychoanalysis takes a long time. Although this can be seen as a negative, it can also be seen as a positive. Tschuschke et al stated that a long process means that more information can be accumulated. This therefore makes the therapy more accurate. However, it can be subjective. Different therapists will have different views and interpretations on the information they have been give. This therefore reduces its reliability. Another negative for the therapy is the cost. Each session is quite costly and if the therapy does carry on for a long period of time, say a couple of years, then it is an expensive method of treating abnormality. However, if the patient responds well to the therapy and they only need a limited amount of seesions then it can be a cheap method, compared to the price of being on drugs for the rest of your life. Another factor which affects how well psychoanalsis treats abnormality is the type of disorder. If used alone, some disorders may not be cured using this method. For example, Schizophrenia. Although, a way to over come this could be by combining this tecnique with the biological approach- the use of drugs. Using the schizophrenia example, drugs will remove the hilusinations and help the patient to talk to therapists.

Another type of therapy to treat abormality is Systematic Desensitizathon which is part of the behavioural approach. This type of therapy aims to replace the maladaptive response (the fear) to a certain situation or object using reverse conditioning. There are 5 steps within this type of therapy. Firstly, the parient starts by learning relaxation techniques, they then image a hierarchy of anxiety provoking situations from the least to the most. The third step, reciprocal inhibition, states that two incompatible emotional states cannot exist together. To begin with, relaxation is linked to the least anxiety-provoking situation, so when the client is relaxed the therapist is able to move up the hierarchy. If the client begins to become anxious, then then therapist calls a halt and relaxes the client. When they are calm, it can begin again. This eventually helps the client to tolerate increasingly difficult situations in the hierarchy. This procedure states that if someone has learnt a dysfuntional behaviour through classical or operant conditionaling then they can be changed through the same process.  

This type of therapy is very effective at treating phobias, such as the fear of heights. However, it isnt very good at treating other types of abnormality. Systematic Desensitation can be used in real life situatuations or in imagined situatuoins. This therefore gives the therapy a high level of practical application as it can be done in a therapists room, or in a area which the client uses most often. This allows them to then repeat the techniques used by the therapist on their own, at their own leisure. However, each process of the therapy can take a long time, and each session usually lasts an hour. So, as a result, the therapist and client may not get very far in a session, and may have to back track during their next session in order to make progress. It can be hard to make progress in some situations, however it depends on the client. Ethically, this type of therapy is bad. It can