Schizophrenia treatments – cognitive behavioral therapy – Flashcards

assumes people have distorted beliefs which affect behavior to make it maladaptive. It helps reduce positive symptoms.

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

patients are set tasks outside of the therapy room which aim to improve their general levels of functioning. This helps reduce malfunctioning and faulty cause and effect assumptions. The therapist will allow the patient to develop their own alternatives to their delusions.

Found benefits in terms of a reduction of positive symptoms and a 20-25% reduction in recovery time for patients when given an eclectic combination of CBT and antipsychotics.

a combination of different treatments to get the greatest results possible

There are lower drop-out rates and greater patient satisfaction rates when CBT is given in combination with antipsychotics

It works by generating a less distressing explanation for psychotic experiences, rather than eliminating them. Negative symptoms often serve as a 'safety behavior', a way of avoiding making positive symptoms worse. CBT helps alleviate the maladaptive thought processes, and if these go away so should the positive symptoms.

it is commonly believed that not everyone with schizophrenia may benefit from CBT. Older patients, or patients with more distressing symptoms, seem less suitable as they cannot fully engage in the therapy.

in a study of 142 schizophrenic patients in Hampshire, they found many patients were not deemed suitable for CBT because patients did not believe that they could fully engage in the therapy.

a lot of the studies that support CBT do not randomly allocate patients to the conditions. This may possibly affect the results.

how were the patients deemed unsuitable? under what criteria? ethics - refusing a patient a treatment can have catastrophic results this study was only dont in Hampshire, which can only be generalised to hampshire. The results cannot be applied to other areas of england or other countries.

CBT admits that a course of antipsychotics greatly increases the possibility of improvement in a patient, however this means that we have little evidence for the efficiency of CBT on its own.

covers both the psychological and biological aspects of schizophrenia, making it very wide. This allows to make predictions assuming that both nature and nurture play a part in the condition.