Treatments provided by the primary care team include psychotherapy or medication or both.
Psychological treatment is aimed at the reduction of abnormal behavior in individuals through psychological means. The goals of psychotherapy include changing maladaptive behavior, minimizing or eliminating stressful environmental conditions, reducing negative affect, improving interpersonal competencies, resolving personal conflicts, modifying a person’s inaccurate assumptions about himself /herself and fostering a more positive self image. Although, these goals are by no means easy to achieve, psychological treatment methods have been shown to be generally effective in promoting adaptive psychological functioning in many troubled individuals.
Many approaches to psychological treatment have been developed to treat individuals with psychological disorders. Several psychodynamic variants of therapy have been developed in recent times. These approaches accept some elements of Freudian theory but diverge on key points such as the length of time to be devoted to therapy or the role of primitive psychosexual drives in personality dynamics. For the most part, they emphasize on interpersonal processes as affected by early interactions with significant others.
Cognitive behavior Therapy: This originated almost 50 years ago and has come to be used extensively in treating clinical problems. Behavior therapy approaches make use of a number of techniques such as guided exposure and biofeedback as well as aversion therapy, modeling and reinforcement approaches. Recently, behavior therapy methods have been applied to private events i.e. thoughts or cognitions with a great deal of success. Cognitive behavior therapy attempts to modify a person’s self-statements and construal of events to change his/her behavior. These methods have been used for a wide variety of clinical problems ranging from depression to anger control and with a wide range of clinical populations.
Humanistic experimental therapies: One of the earliest of these approaches is the client centered or person centered approach of Carl Rogers originating in the 1940s and has received broad acceptance and has provided a valuable conceptualization of the client therapist interaction as well as specific techniques for generating personal change or personal growth in motivated clients.
Family therapy: In addition to individual treatment approaches, some psychological treatments are applied to problematic relationships through marital or family therapy.
In recent years concerted attempts have been made to integrate the various available conceptions and techniques of inducing behavioral change. This effort is a result of the recognition that elements from differing approaches can be used to increase our understanding of troubled clients and to bring about desired alterations of functioning.
