Psychological Approaches to Health Practices

P2, Explain Different psychological approaches to health practices
For this part of the assignment I am going to be explaining the behavioural perspective and the cognitive psychological perspective, these are used to help overcome struggling challenges that people face in health and social care.
The Behavioural Approach
Some health care practitioners and psychologists work closely with people whose problems are the result of maladaptive behaviours. Maladaptive behaviours are the way that people cope with particular situations or stress in life that damage themselves or others. Some examples of maladaptive behaviours are heavy drinking, drug taking due to stress and avoidance of traveling. Care Practitioners and psychologists use behavioural techniques to change behaviour such as maladaptive and disobedient behaviour. When looking at the behaviourist approach in health care the example I will be looking at are the way a clinical psychologist helped treat a patient who is suffering from a phobia of snakes by using the behavioural therapy approach and a clinical psychologist treating a patient who has OCD by using the cognitive therapy approach.
Phobias are often treated using a technique called systematic Desensitization. Systematic desensitization is a treatment for phobias in which the patient is exposed to progressively more anxiety-provoking stimuli ad taught relaxation techniques. This is done by the care practitioner and the phobic person forming a “hierarchy of fear”. This involves the conditioned stimulus; for example a snake, that are ranked from least fearful to most fearful. The treatment stage involves gradually exposing the person to varying degrees of fear, while also helping to relax and cope with each exposure. For example a snake phobic might regard one small stationary snake, 6 metres away as only modestly threatening, but a large rapidly moving snake a metre away highly threatening. The individual would create a list of aspects associated with the fear of snakes. The individual will enter a state of relaxation and confronts each of these items, moving from the bottom of the list to the top until none of them cause anxiety. Over a period of time the procedure is repeated until the final, most fear-invoking, object or situation can be faced without worry. Systematic desensitization has been used effectively to help people overcome all kinds of phobias from agoraphobia, claustrophobia or arachnophobia and many more, that causes distress and disrupt people’s lives.
We sometimes learn inappropriate or unhelpful behaviours, the principles of operant conditioning can create new, more helpful behaviours and eliminate the unhelpful ones. The use of reinforcement or punishment, even both are very powerful ways of changing someone behaviour; this is behavioural modification. Challenging behaviour is any form of behaviour that is out of keeping with the expected standards or patterns of behaviour in a culture or society. It’s behaviour that challenged normal expectations and standards. Challenging behaviour is usually associated with children experiencing “tantrums” and adults who have mental health problems, dementia or learning disabilities. Behavioural analysis and treatment of challenging behaviour tries to identify the causes, triggers and consequences of the behaviour.
The Cognitive Approach
The cognitive perspective is also used in many services and organisations to help service users. Cognitive approaches can be used to help people who “misread” or misinterpret situations. This usually happens to people with learning disabilities who may become confused and overwhelmed by the struggles of everyday life. This perspective is also used to discover different cognitive processes, to outline different ways of coping/learning/thinking. Cognitive therapies are widely used to support people with emotional problems as well as learning difficulties. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) was developed by Aaron Beck in1960, to treat people with depression and was used to identify cognitive trade. The aim of the CBT is to challenge negative thoughts and to enable each person to develop an alternative, positive view of the world. Whenever an individual experiences negative thoughts about anything, they must write down in the dairy. If they do this, the care practitioner they are working with can work out ways of challenging these patterns of negative behaviour. Once they have learnt new coping methods CBT enables individual’s to identify and deal with their own thinking errors. CBT is sometimes used to treat long-term conditions, such as irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). CBT cannot treat the psychical symptoms of these problems but can help patients cope better.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; PTSD is a mental health problem which people who have been exposed to traumatic and frightening events. It is mainly people who have suffered from serious abuse, soldiers and victims of crime. Some symptoms of having PTSD would be having; vivid flashbacks, intrusive thoughts and images, nightmares and a lot more. As a result of people having PTSD they can often become very anxious, have poor sleep and poor concentration, and may become hyper-vigilant because they believe that the event could reoccur. This may lead to the person using avoidance strategies, becoming withdrawn and estranged from others and developing maladaptive feelings and behaviours as ways of coping. Mental health workers who support and treat people from suffering PTSD try to help them to make new associations and to reframe their thoughts in a way that leaves the traumatic event in the past.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental health condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive activity. OCD symptoms can be from mild to severe, some people with OCD can take over there life however others can spend an hour or so engaged in obsessive-compulsive thinking and behaviour. A number of factors have been considered to be the cause of OCD, in some cases the condition may run in families and may be linked to certain inherited genes that affect the brains development. Brain studies have shown that people with OCD’s brain can be different from people without the condition. Studies have also shown that people with OCD have an imbalance of serotonin in their brain. It’s noted that around 12 in every 1,000 people in the UK are affected by the condition. The main treatment for OCD is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), this involves encouraging a patient to face the fear and let the obsessive thoughts occur without “neutralising” them with compulsions. Linking to the Case study of Karen Roberts She had OCD for 24 years before seeking clinical help, her case of OCD was very extreme where she would wash her hands at least 90 times a day if she is having a bad day. She would also wash her clothes every day and her coats after she wore them this was because she thought that it would be contaminating other people and would become even more serious and lead to death. By seeking Clinical Help this allowed Karen to control what she does and help he realise that actually by not washing her hands so many time she is not going to cause anyone any harm or worse even death.
P3, Explain how psychological theories can be applied to health and Social care
The Humanistic Approach
When applying the humanistic perspective to social care this approach is based on Rogers theory, that al individual’s should be given unconditional possitve regard. If a care worker can show unconditional possitve regard the service usr will portray signs of feeling more confident and worthy. For a carworker to show good skills they should show unconditional possitve regard, be empathetic, be an active listener and adopt a non judgemental approach.
Empathy involves listening an trying to understand another person’s feelings or the situation that they are in. This can mainoly be difficult to do and is distinct from sympathy. The care worker needs to put aside any preconceptions they have in order to recognise how the person is struggling to deal with specific problems. Unlike sympathy, where we feel sorry for someone, epathy requires care workers, and people to listen to the other person, be in tune with their emotions and respect them for who they are. For a careworker to achieve empathy it is important for them to observe the other person’s body language. Health and social care practioners generally recognise empathy as important and try to use it in their care practice as much as they can.
Respecting individuals and being non-judgmental is a very important key aspect for social workers to have in the social care sector. Individual needs, identity, and preferences should always be respected by all social workers. It is good practice not to criticise or make personal judgments about people who receive care. This is known as discriminating against someone, and is against most service provider's code of conduct. An example of this is that humanistic psychologists argue that we need to try to identify with other individuals - in order to avoid discriminatory practice and to provide services that meet each individual needs, and also preferences. In this way, the humanistic view very much values the person worth of each individual, and always puts the service user at the heart of the service.
Active Listening also plays an impotant role in the humanistic concepts of empathy. To be Active listening effectively it involves paying attention to the other person’s facial expressions; Body Language; Tone of Voice; and focus on the subject of the conversations.

http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/#.VPXERkVFDc