Welcome to your first full week of 2021. I hope the year is going well for you so far. I wanted my first message of the year to be something education as that is something important to me as I try to take the stigma of mental health within my personal and professional communities. So here it goes:
There are 5 major models of mental health theories. And most therapists will work from one of these major categories. There are behaviorism, biological, psychodynamic, cognitive, and humanistic.
-Behaviorism is the most commonly used theory. Have you heard of Pavlov’s dogs, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), or exposure therapy? These are some of Behaviorism theory. It’s been around for a long time (1913) and was developed to take maladaptive behaviors and change them to adaptive ones. A formative belief is that the person (mental health) is not the problem, the behavior is.
-Biological is the belief that the disorder is biological and is treated with medications, procedures, or other medical interventions to intervene and “cure” a person's malady or negative behavior. A lobotomy is an example of one of the early biological mental health interventions. A theorist in 1935 believed that patients with obsessive behavior were suffering from fixed circuits in the brain. So let’s unfix them with a procedure. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15629160
-Psychodynamic is the belief that people’s past experiences shape how they think, behave, and respond to certain stimuli or their environment. Any trauma processing or grief work will likely fall under this category. This theory began in the early 1900’s with Sigmund Freud- when he stated he could predict how we would act through or id, ego, and superego based on our interactions with our mothers/caregivers.
-Cognitive theory states that our thoughts are the problem and with specific behaviors we can change perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning. This started with Piaget’s developmental theory and took Freud’s beliefs and examined them. Erickson’s stages of development will fall into this area.
-Lastly, Humanistic theory developed by Carl Rogers in the late 1960s-70s focused on the individual and how that individual experiences the world and things around them. It steered away from “dysfunction” and how we can use what we feel and experience for greater empathy and positiveness. This is where Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs comes into play.
My apologies for such a long message, but I believe fully in the power of knowledge, and knowing what you are doing and how you are doing plays a big role in our mental health. If you’d like to talk further about any of these approaches or are curious about how I practice or anyone you have worked with does. Let’s talk!
Have a good Wednesday! Lorry
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