Psychological Therapies for Schizophrenia

CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:

In CBT patients are encouraged to trace back the origins of their symptoms to try and understand how they might have begun.

CBT assumes that people have distorted beliefs which influence their behaviour to make it maladaptive.

Patients are told to try and rationalise the content of the delusions or voices they hear and try to figure out ways to test the validity of them.

The therapist will try and let the patient come up with alternative to cope with the maladaptive thought processes by trying to get them to use coping strategies already present in the patients mind.

Advantages

• There is a lot of supporting evidence to prove the effectivness of CBT.
• Targets the cause not the effects
• There are no side effects which also means theres no drug dependancy
• There is a very low patient drop out rate and deals with both positive and negative symptoms.
• Jones et al (2000) did a meta analysis supporting the effectiveness of CBT

Disadvantages

• To have maximum help its best done alongside drug therapy
• It can take a long time to take effect and the patient must be willing.
• Its cheaper than drug treatment
• Its not so much a cure as it is thought manipulation/modification.

Psychoanalysis works on the basis that the reason behind the disorder is deep in the unconscious mind and the therapy therefore strives to bring these problems to the surface and the conscious mind to be dealt with.

Evaluation:

Schizophrenia Patient Outcome Research Team (POCT) found that some forms of psychoanalysis can be harmful to patients

however

Gottdiener (2000) did a meta-analysis finding that it was an effective treatment for schizophrenia.

as with CBT May(1968) found it works best alongside drugs.

Psychoanalysis is a long and expensive treatment and there's not much research been done into it. It is criticised as schizophrenics are vulnerable and easily suggestible.