There are dozens of approaches to psychotherapy that can be used to treat mental illness. Psychotherapy has been found effective in the treatment of mental illness. The use of medication management along with psychotherapy has been found to result in multiple positive outcomes (“Laureate Education (Producer)”,2016). This raises questions whether psychotherapy has a basis in medicine. Neuroimaging studies by Fournier and Price (2014) show that there were activity changes in the brain at the regions associated with negative emotion and fear after psychotherapy. According to Wheeler (2014), psychotherapy has a biological basis because it can be used to restore balance, harmony, integration, and connection of neural networks at the cellular level. Memory is usually stored in neural networks which are based on a series of events, emotions, sensations, and images. Psychotherapy works by ensuring that the neural networks at the cellular level become well connected and this promotes healing from mental illness.
Factors such as culture, religion, and one’s socioeconomic background can affect the perspective of an individual on the value of psychotherapy treatment. Wheeler (2014) observes that the psychotherapist must recognize the differences in cultural values when assessing their patients. This is because the client can come from a cultural background where it is considered a taboo to discuss their emotions, past traumas, and fears. Religion and spirituality can also affect one’s perception of the value of psychotherapy. Religious individuals may find that psychotherapy as a secular field that is not aligned with their spiritual and religious beliefs. Barnett (2016) observes that psychotherapists that fail to attend to the religious beliefs and practices of the patient may lead to the patient dropping out. One’s socioeconomic background may also affect the perception of the value of psychotherapy. De Haan et al. (2015) observe that one’s socioeconomic background can determine whether or not they drop from psychotherapy. One’s socioeconomic background also affected their education and this determined whether they saw psychotherapy as important or not.
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References
Barnett, J. E. (2016). Are religion and spirituality of relevance in psychotherapy? Spirituality in Clinical Practice , 3 (1), 5.
De Haan, A. M., Boon, A. E., Vermeiren, R. R., Hoeve, M., & de Jong, J. T. (2015, February). Ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and problem severity as dropout risk factors in psychotherapy with youth. In Child & youth care forum (Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 1-16). Springer US.
Fournier, J. C., & Price, R. B. (2014). Psychotherapy and neuroimaging. Psychotherapy: New Evidence and New Approaches, 12(3), 290–298. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207360/
Laureate Education (Producer). (2016). Introduction to psychotherapy with individuals [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Wheeler, K. (Eds.). (2014). Psychotherapy for the advanced practice psychiatric nurse: A how-to guide for evidence-based practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company.
