PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND THERAPIES

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MARK SUFFOLK

GROUP A

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND THERAPIES

    There are different therapies available in psychopathology. All treatments are supposed to benefit the patient. However as therapists charge for these services it is sometimes unclear how much of the treatment is for the benefit of the patient and how much is for the therapist, because of this ethical issues arise.

    One approach is psychoanalysis. The main technique is free association, the patient is encouraged to talk freely about their childhood and relationships. The aim of psychoanalysis is to make people happier and better adjusted, and as the patient is talking freely the patient is actively involved in the process. However a problem is that the therapy is difficult to evaluate as happiness is hard to measure. It is also important to note that patients are paying a lot of money to a psychoanalysist and it isn’t obvious when the treatment should cease. The treatment could last for years therefore this raises the issue of who is getting the most benefit the patient or the therapist. Patients also have to give consent to the therapy at the beginning, because of this the patient sometimes feels obliged to carry on with the treatment even if they are not happy to do so.

    Psychoanalysists try to get the patient to give an insight to the root causes of feelings by asking the patient to talk freely about difficult issues. This can put the patient in a very stressful situation, and perhaps this stress is worse than the problem the patient had beforehand.

    One Feature of psychoanalysis is transference. Transference in itself is needed in therapist and patient relationships and is not necessarily a bad thing. However there are times when the therapist projects his or her personal feelings back onto the patient. This leads to concerns over the potential for sexual abuse. Nanette Gartrell discovered 6% of psychoanalysts admitted at some stage to having sexual contact with a patient. Whilst the therapist claimed it was a necessary part of the treatment, the patients said it was damaging to not only themselves but the therapist as well.

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   In psychoanalysis the therapist has to analyse what the patient is saying. Each therapist has their own belief system and it is subjective as to what they consider the problem and solution should be. There are other therapies with belief systems such as cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy. However it is unlikely the patient is in a position to evaluate any belief system. The patient’s thoughts cannot be measured and it could take a lot of money and time for a therapist to reconstruct a patient’s personality to get to the underlying causes of problems. This again raises concerns ...

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