Treatment
No single treatment for a mental disorder is appropriate for everyone. The best types of treatment programs involve a combination of therapies and other services to meet the needs of the individual.
Mental Health Treatments
These are the treatment methods most commonly used by mental health professionals:
Behavioral Therapy: This approach focuses on concrete behavior ‹ changing unwanted or maladaptive behaviors through rewards, reinforcements, and desensitization. This approach has been found especially effective with phobias.
Biomedical Treatment: Medication alone, or in combination with psychotherapy, has proven to be an effective treatment for a number of emotional, behavioral, and mental disorders. The five major categories of mental health medication include mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and stimulant medications.
Cognitive Therapy: This method aims to identify and correct distorted thinking patterns than lead to feelings and behaviors that may be troublesome, self-defeating, or even self-destructive.
Cognitive/Behavioral Therapy: As a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapies, this approach helps people change negative thought patterns, beliefs, and behaviors. This is one of the most effective approaches to treating depression and anxiety disorders.
Complementary/Alternative Approaches: These emphasize the relationship between mind, body, and spirit. Techniques include self-help groups, diet adjustment, pastoral counseling, expressive therapies, meditation, massage, biofeedback, or exercise.
Couples or Family Counseling: This approach utilizes the strengths and resources of families to help individuals and family members deal with the consequences of mental illness and emotional distress.
Electroconvulsive Therapy: Also known as ECT, this sometimes controversial technique uses low voltage electrical stimulation of the brain to treat some forms of major depression, acute mania, and some forms of schizophrenia. This potentially life saving technique is generally considered only when other approaches have failed.
Family Therapy: This approach, based on a systems perspective, utilizes the strength of families to lessen the impact of mental illness. Therapy involves discussions and problem-solving sessions facilitated by a therapist, often with the entire family group.
Group Therapy: This form of therapy involves groups of usually 4 to 12 people who have similar problems and who meet regularly with a therapist.
Interpersonal Psychotherapy: Through one-on-one conversations, this approach focuses on the patient¹s current life and relationships within the family, social, and work environments.
Play Therapy: Used with young children, this technique employs a variety of play activities to establish communication with the therapist and resolve problems. Children are thought to act out their conflicts and fears in an imaginative way.
Psychoanalysis: This focuses on past conflicts as underpinnings to current emotional and behavioral problems. In this long-term and intensive therapy, an individual meets with a psychoanalyst frequently, using "free association" to reveal unconscious motivations and earlier, unproductive patterns of resolving issues.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Based on the principles of psychoanalysis, this therapy typically occurs less frequently and spans a shorter time.
Drug Addiction Treatment
Treatment varies with the characteristics of the patient and type of substances abused. It may involve counseling, behavioral therapies, medications, or a combination of both, and attendance at Narcotics-Anonymous meetings.
Drugs such as Methadone and levo-alpha-acetylmethodol (LAAM) help reduce drug use in addictions to opiates. For some opiate addicts and some with co-occurring alcohol dependence, Naltrexone may be effective. Individuals with co-existing mental disorders should have both disorders treated in an integrated way. Relapses may occur.
Alcoholism Treatment
Treatment depends on the severity of an individual's alcoholism and the resources available in his or her community. Treatment may include detoxification (safely getting alcohol out of one¹s system); taking doctor-prescribed medications, such as disulfiram (Antabuse) or naltrexone (ReVia TM) to help prevent a return to drinking; and individual and/or group counseling.
Virtually all alcoholism treatment programs also include a twelve-step recovery program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Marital counseling, family therapy and Al-Anon meetings may also be part of the recovery process.
Information courtesy of the American Association of World Health