Systematic Desensitization
- Created by: z_mills1
- Created on: 19-05-14 10:55
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- Psychological therapies - Systematic Desensitization
- used in the treatment of anxiety, particularly anxiety associated with phobias
- aim is to reduce or eliminate the anxiety that people associate with feared objects or situations - which interfere with being able to lead a normal life
- Step 1 - patient is taught how to relax their muscles completely
- Step 2 - therapist and patient together construct a desensitisation hierarchy - a series of imagined scenes, each one causing a little more anxiety than the previous one
- Step 3 - patient gradually works their way through the hierarchy, visualising each anxiety-evoking event while relaxing
- Step 4 - once the patient has mastered one step in the hierarchy they are ready to move on to the next
- Step 5 - patient eventually masters the feared situation that caused them to seek help in the first place
- Evaluation
- Strengths
- relatively quick and requires less effort on the patient's part that other psychotherapies
- patients are more likely to persevere, making treatment more likely to succeed
- SD is successful for a range of anxiety disorders e.g. fear and flying
- McGrath et al. estimate that SD is effective in about 75% of patients with phobias
- relatively quick and requires less effort on the patient's part that other psychotherapies
- Limitations
- SD may appear to resolve a problem, but simply eliminating symptoms (rather than cause) may result in other symptoms appearing later on
- SD appears to be less effective in treating anxieties that have an underlying adaptive component (e.g. fear of dangerous animals) than those acquired through personal experience
- Strengths
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