Behavior therapy

Behavior therapy focuses on changing unwanted or unhealthy behaviors, typically using a system of rewards, reinforcements of 
positive behavior and desensitization. Desensitization is a process of confronting something that causes anxiety, fear or discomfort 
and overcoming those responses.  If one has a fear of germs that triggers excessive hand washing, for instance, they are taught 
techniques to stop your excessive washing.

Cognitive therapy

Cognitive therapy is based on the belief that faulty thinking patterns and belief systems cause psychological problems and that 
changing our thoughts improves our mental and emotional health and results in changes in behavior. Cognitive therapy is designed 
to help you identify and change distorted thought (cognitive) patterns that can lead to feelings and behaviors that are troublesome, 
self-defeating or self-destructive. It's based on the premise that how you interpret your experiences in life determines the way you feel 
and behave. Like behavior therapy, cognitive therapy focuses on your current problem, rather than addressing underlying or past issues 
or conflicts. Unlike behavior therapy, however, your experiences are an important part of the cognitive therapy process. Often cognitive 
therapy will work in conjunction with behavioral therapy and you may see the term "Cognitive-Behavioral".

Cognitive-Behavior therapy

Cognitive-Behavior therapy combines features of both cognitive and behavioral therapies.  Negative beliefs and behaviors are replaced
with healthy positive ones.  The treatment is based on the premise that ones own thoughts, rather than external situations determine  
their behavior.

Biofeedback

Use of electronic systems to monitor internal processes such as heart rate, brain waves, or perspiration to help an individual become aware
of their physiological responses and learn to have more control over them.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also known as electroshock, is a treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized 
patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for major depression which has not responded to other 
treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania and other disorders. First introduced in the 1930s , it gained widespread use as 
a form of treatment in the 1940s and 50s. Today, an estimated 1 million people worldwide receive ECT every year, usually in a course 
of 6-12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing)

Technique of restructuring thought patterns and associations related to traumatic events and memories and other sources of emotional 
distress.  Francine Shapiro developed EMDR when she discovered that rapid-eye movements combined with focusing on disturbing 
thoughts and memories produced a "working through" of the underlying emotional disturbance.

Exposure therapy

Exposure therapy is a form of behavior therapy that deliberately exposes you to the very thing that you find upsetting or disturbing. 
It's especially useful for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder. Under controlled circumstances, 
exposure to the event or things that trigger your obsessive thoughts or traumatic reactions can help you learn to cope with them effectively.

Family Systems

Family systems looks at the entire family as a complex system having its own language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs, and patterns.  Each 
family member plays a part in the system and family systems therapy helps an individual discover how his or her family operated, that 
person’s role in the system, and how it affects the individual’s relationship with the current family and relationships outside the family. 
Within this category there are various theories and approaches to family therapy.

Adlerian (Individual Psychotherapy)

Jungian (Analytic)

The focus of therapy is to help individuals access more of their inner world (unconscious) and develop greater self-realization and 
individuation. Carl. G. Jung's theory is psychoanalytic, but differs from traditional Freudian theory in that Jung added the concepts of 
individuation (human potential), which includes transcendence and spirituality. People are seen in a positive light and therapy considers 
the soul, which seeks to be nurtured by something larger than the self.

Freudian (Psychoanalytic)

Psychoanalysis is a long-term, intensive therapy that often involves several sessions a week with a psychoanalyst for several years. 
Based on the belief that true change and growth comes from bringing unconscious thoughts, motivations, feelings, and experiences 
into consciousness so that behavior and thought is based on current reality. Key concepts are that behavior is determined by unconscious 
motivations, irrational forces, instinctual drives, and psychosexual events occurring during the first 6 years of life. Classical psychoanalysis 
is an intensive and long term process with a focus on transference (transferring feelings about and reactions to past significant others onto 
the therapist) and uncovering unconscious material through dream analysis and free association.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy, based on psychoanalytic theory, focuses on increasing awareness of unconscious thoughts and behaviors, 
developing new insights into your motivations, and resolving neurotic conflict.  It's less intense and less frequent than psychoanalysis and
is usually done sitting face to face with a therapist. 

Psychodynamic psychotherapy includes a variety of therapeutic techniques, such as exploring the past, confronting beliefs and actions, and 
supportive exploration of thoughts and behavior. Awareness of the link between a feeling, thought, symptom or behavior and an unconscious 
meaning or motivator leads to modification of unwanted behavior or thoughts.

Psychopharmacologic Medication

In the latter half of the 20th century, research into new psychopharmacologic drugs exploded, with many new drugs being discovered, created, 
and tested. Many once-popular drugs are now out of favor, and there are fashions in psychiatric drugs as with any other kind of drug.

Only since the 1950s has the use of psychiatric drugs to restore mental health or at least limit aberrant behavior, been a part of medical 
therapeutics, when a number of new classes of pharmacological agents were discovered, notably tranquillizers and antidepressants.

There are six main groups of psychiatric medications.

• Antidepressants: used to treat clinical depression and anxiety

• Stimulants: used to treat disorders such as ADHD and narcolepsy

• Antipsychotics: used to treat psychosis such as schizophrenia

• Mood Stabilizers: used to treat bipolar disorder

• Anxiolytics: used to treat anxiety disorders

• Depressants: used as sedatives

RET (Rational Emotive Therapy)

RET is based on the assumption that our emotions result from our beliefs, interpretations, and reactions to life events.  It remains a type of 
cognitive therapy based more on thinking and doing than with the expression of feelings.

Rogerian (Client-Centered)

Clients are believed to be in the best position to resolve their issues if the therapist can establish a warm, accepting, and safe environment in 
which the individual feels free to talk about his/her issues and can gain insight into them.  This type of therapy is non-directive because the 
therapist typically does not give advice or make interpretations.

Self Psychology

Based on  Freudian and Jungian psychology,  Heinz Kohut, its founder, postulated that narcissism and grandiosity in the infant is healthily 
managed by “self object” experiences which can be idealizing, mirroring, or twinning experiences.  The experience of the infant is the most 
important and it is the primary caretaker’s responsibility to respond to the infant in an affirming and validating manner. The relationship 
between client and therapist is most important, like that of mother and child, and the healing comes with the resolution, understanding and 
working through of that relationship.

Solution-Focused

Solution-focused treatment presumes that most psychological problems are present only intermittently. Solution-focused therapy helps the 
patient notice when symptoms are diminished or absent and use this knowledge as a foundation for recovery. If a patient insists that the 
symptoms are constant and unrelieved, the therapist works with him or her to find exceptions and make the exceptions more frequent, 
predictable, and controllable. Therapy builds on solutions already available to the patient.