Psychosocial Therapy: Characteristics, Objectives And Operation
Psychosocial therapy is used especially in cases of people with schizophrenia This therapy seeks the rehabilitation and reintegration of the person with a mental disorder into society. It focuses on enhancing the patient’s empathy and promoting different types of skills (social, communicative…).
In addition, it also takes the family into account, and starts from an integrative perspective, which allows the subject to be understood in its entirety. In this article we will learn about its characteristics, the techniques it uses, the objectives it pursues and how it can help people affected by schizophrenia.
Psychosocial therapy is a type of therapy especially indicated for patients with a schizophrenic disorder. It is based on a holistic vision of the person, understanding that the disorder arises from a series of multifactorial causes and where the genetic component also has an important weight.
This type of therapy, also called psychosocial and occupational rehabilitation, It seeks above all the reintegration of the person with mental disorder into society It is usually developed by an interdisciplinary team of mental health professionals (primary care doctors, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists…). Regarding its theoretical foundations, it is based on a vulnerability-stress model.
This vulnerability-stress model maintains that, in mental disorders, there is a prior vulnerability (biological, social…) in the person, but also a series of external events that, “in contact” with said vulnerability, trigger the symptoms.
Applied to the case of schizophrenia, there would be a series of triggering (stressors) and external factors, in the subject’s environment, which are the ones that would trigger or originate the psychotic outbreak; this would occur because there is a prior personal vulnerability in the patient
Treatments in schizophrenia
There are different types of psychological treatments aimed at schizophrenia. We can classify them into four large blocks: interventions aimed at the organization of care (where we would find psychosocial therapy); group interventions on cognitive variables, social cognition and social skills (HHSS); psychoeducational group interventions, and cognitive-behavioral packages (individual approach).
Within each of these blocks, we would find different therapies indicated for patients with a schizophrenic disorder. At the same time, There are different degrees of effectiveness of the therapies s, according to reference manuals (effective, probably effective and experimental therapies). Psychosocial therapy, in particular, has been shown to be effective in the treatment of schizophrenia. This means that various controlled studies have been carried out that support its effectiveness.
Goals
Psychosocial therapy or psychosocial rehabilitation establishes a series of objectives that can be personalized and adapted to each case. These are, fundamentally:
1. Acquire or recover skills
These skills can be of different types: social skills (that facilitate interactions with others), cognitive skills, coping with stress, tolerance for frustration, etc.
2. Promote social integration
The achievement of social integration is also related to the promotion of autonomous functioning in the patient That is, both concepts go hand in hand; The integration of the patient into society (with a circle of friends, an involved family network, a job…) will favor their autonomy, and vice versa.
3. Prevent deterioration
Preventing patient deterioration It is also achieved through the prevention of their marginalization and institutionalization.
4. Rehabilitate work
This objective relates to protected employment (protected labor market). Within it, we find the CET (Special Work Centers) or CEE (Special Employment Centers), where people who have a minimum degree of disability of 33% can work. In this case, people with schizophrenia could enter the labor market doing an adapted job, the closest thing to an ordinary job.
5. Advise and support families
Families of people with schizophrenia also suffer greatly from their loved one’s disorder, especially families who are very involved.
That is why psychosocial therapy, in addition to providing guidelines and psychological care, aims for families to learn to identify the warning signs of a possible psychotic outbreak in their family member (son, brother, cousin…). This will be important to anticipate and be able to act sooner, going to a medical professional.
Psychosocial therapy for schizophrenia has as its fundamental objective the psychosocial rehabilitation of the person, and their integration into the community. This means that seeks to free the patient from the social stigmatization that surrounds the fact of suffering from a mental disorder and that they can lead a life as “normal” and autonomous as possible, with their human rights preserved and a good quality of life.
On the other hand, this type of therapy, as we already indicated at the beginning, It focuses a lot on emotions and their perception ; That is, it aims for the patient to learn to identify different emotions, and the situations that provoke them.
It also seeks to ensure that the patient can not only understand himself, but also others. That is, he can correctly interpret social situations, body gestures, the words of others, etc. All these elements and objectives, according to psychosocial therapy, will increase the patient’s quality of life and facilitate their social integration.
The final objective is for the subject to “adapt” to the mental disorder and learn to live with it.
Techniques
The techniques and strategies used by psychosocial therapy are based, above all, on promoting the patient’s empathy through tools and tasks that allow working on the recognition of emotions.
To work on empathy, therapy focuses on the well-known theory of mind a capacity that explains the fact that we can put ourselves in the place of another, and that we can understand that there are mental states (and thoughts, reflections, opinions…) in the minds of other people, different from ours.
1. Communication techniques
On the other hand, some communication techniques are also used especially in psychosocial therapy, with the objective that the patient learns to communicate effectively and assertively, respecting others and respecting oneself. They are techniques, therefore, that promote healthy communication and a correct expression of emotions.
Psychosocial therapy also has behavioral techniques and cognitive techniques (which we will see later). Behavioral techniques, in addition to allowing the patient’s inappropriate behaviors to be worked on, and enhancing the patient’s adaptive behaviors, are especially aimed at promoting and enhancing the patient’s adherence to pharmacological treatment.
The pharmacological treatment (which are usually antipsychotics) in the case of schizophrenia, as well as in all mental disorders, is of vital importance so that the patient can lead as normal a life as possible.
In addition, drugs can significantly reduce and alleviate the patient’s symptoms, helping the patient recover after a psychotic break. That is, psychopharmacological treatment in this case is a basic, essential treatment that allows us to work with the patient at other levels (at a social, work, psychological level…).
Without a correct medical prescription (that is, a treatment appropriate to the needs and profile of the patient) and correct adherence to pharmacological treatment by the patient, psychosocial therapy cannot “act.”
3. Cognitive techniques
On the other hand, cognitive techniques, which can also be used in psychosocial therapy (although it is not as common), They are focused on reducing distorted thoughts about reality that worry the patient
However, it is true that to treat delusions and hallucinations, for example, as well as paranoid thoughts, a therapy within the block of cognitive-behavioral packages for schizophrenia (mentioned at the beginning) is more indicated.
This is because psychosocial therapy, in reality, is more focused on rehabilitating and reintegrating the patient into society; for this, but it is true that It is important that both the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia are controlled
4. Integrative approach
Thus, we are seeing how psychosocial therapy is based on an integrative approach, which aims to maintain a holistic view of the disorder and the person who suffers from it. That is why it draws on strategies and tools from different fields and theoretical orientations within psychology.
