15.5 SUMMARY

• Mental illness is often misunderstood and too often goes untreated, affecting an individual’s ability to function and also causing social and financial burdens.
• Many people who suffer from mental illness do not get the help they need; they may be unaware that they have a problem, they may be uninterested in getting help for their problem, or they may face structural barriers to getting treatment.
• Treatments include psychotherapy, which focuses on the mind, and medical and biological methods, which focus on the brain and body.

• Psychodynamic therapies, including psychoanalysis, emphasize helping clients gain insight into their unconscious conflicts.
• Humanistic approaches (e.g., person-centered therapy) and existential approaches (e.g., gestalt therapy) focus on helping people develop a sense of personal worth.
• Behavior therapy applies learning principles to specific behavior problems; cognitive therapy is focused on teaching people to challenge irrational thoughts. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) merges these two approaches.
• Group therapies target couples, families, or groups of clients brought together for the purpose of working together to solve their problems.

• Medications have been developed to treat many psychological disorders, including antipsychotic medications (used to treat schizophrenia and psychotic disorders), antianxiety medications (used to treat anxiety disorders), and antidepressants (used to treat depression and related disorders).
• Medications are often combined with psychotherapy.
• Other biomedical treatments include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and psychosurgery—this last one used in extreme cases, when other methods of treatment have been exhausted.

• Observing improvement during treatment does not necessarily mean that the treatment was effective; it might instead reflect natural improvement, nonspecific treatment effects (e.g., the placebo effect), and reconstructive memory processes.
• Scientific research methods such as double-blind techniques and placebo controls can help establish whether a treatment is really causing improvement.
• Some treatments for psychological disorders are more effective than others for certain disorders, and both medication and psychotherapy have dangers that ethical practitioners must consider carefully.