Treating Mental Health Problems: How Are We Evolving?
As technology grew and science discovered new processes to make our lives easier, psychology also evolved in the treatment of mental health problems.
In the beginning, psychology began to treat mental health problems from what we now call first-generation therapies. The way of working consisted of using mechanisms of learning and “unlearning”, that is, of behavior, action and reaction. It was the stimulus and our learning experience that determined our response.
Answers were reinforced or made more likely with repetitions. All behaviors that had a reward would be learned quickly and would escalate positions in our response repertoire. On the other hand, a response was extinguished when it failed to be reinforced, and even this extinction occurred more quickly if the response was punished.
This first-generation therapy helped us understand one of our most primitive learning mechanisms: conditioning. Logically, one of the branches of psychology that evolved the most under this paradigm was educational psychology, which found in these ideas a simple way to articulate a teaching model based on rewards and punishments. It also served to understand how we make strong associations between some stimuli.
The evolution in the treatment of mental health problems
Second Generation Therapies
Over time, the ideas behind the treatment of mental health problems have evolved and, at this time, so-called second-generation therapies have emerged. How was the form of treatment at this time?
Experts realized that we don’t always act by a stimulus-response association, but that there was something more. What could it be? The brain, emotions, the cognitive part, desires, that is, the essence of each one.
That’s why our thinking is so important in second-generation therapies. We are what we learn, but also what we build with everything we learn. In this conception, we stop being passive and become active, so that our scope for action is multiplied.
Cognition is what makes us face the world in one way or another. Reality is important, but what we perceive of that reality and the interpretation we make of it is even more important. That’s why second-generation therapies began to work with individual attitudes, emotions, or tendencies.
Understanding that we are more than machines that respond according to what we have learned has resulted in the study of the mind itself: a serious attempt to understand what is happening in our “black box” so that some disturbances arise or we experience some paradoxical phenomena.
This new way of understanding our behavior has also given rise to a problem that we struggle with today: measurement. It is very easy to know the distance between two places, but it is not so easy to establish the degree of anxiety that a person may have.
Third Generation Therapies
Already more updated and realizing that, despite the changes, not all mental health problems had a satisfactory solution, third generation therapies emerged.
These therapies understood that the fault is not in the way to solve the problem, but in our relationship with the problem. Therefore, they started to work trying to integrate the difficulties, without trying to solve them directly. The goal was to ensure that problems that had no solution or that had no immediate solution did not harm our lives. Here we will find the most current therapies, which are now well known and used, such as Mindfulness, acceptance therapies, etc.
The problem with this type of therapy is that proving its effectiveness is very complicated. This allows many serious psychologists to use third-generation therapies, but also many quacks or unskilled people. That’s why, in some sectors of more academic psychology, they arouse a certain rejection.
We’ve done a little review of three generations of therapies in psychology. Their diversity in understanding our behaviors, thoughts and emotions showed us different points of view, undoubtedly enriching.
Knowing now a little more about some aspects of how the way of working in psychology has evolved, we realize that they bring us very different perspectives on our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. Furthermore, this heterogeneity in points of view is, without a doubt, enriching for the psychologist, obtaining from each therapy different tools that can be used in consultations for the treatment of mental health problems.
