Psychotherapy

The prime method of treating mental illness is known as psychotherapy. This may take several forms, but in essence it is an attempt on the part of the doctor to change the abnormal behavior that brought the patient to his office by getting him to understand the causes of that behavior so that he can then change it. The doctor's role is more one of listening and suggesting than one of offering advice. We all know how helpful it is at times just to get our troubles off our chests.

In mild cases of mental illness, psychotherapy may be just letting the patient talk his troubles out, reassuring and encouraging him and helping him to create a mentally healthier way of living. This is particularly true in cases of acute anxiety or depression. With more deeply seated difficulties, psychotherapy may require a prolonged exposure of the unconscious problems that have led to the illness. Sometimes group therapy is used, in which a group of patients meets regularly with a psychiatrist, or perhaps a psychologist or psychiatric social workers, so that each patient begins to understand his own problems as he sees those of the others in the group.

The most prolonged and most probing type of psychotherapy is that known as psychoanalysis, in which the effort is made to explore all of the recesses of the personality in order to root out the mental illness. There is widespread confusion about psychoanalysis, and very often psychiatrist and psychoanalyst are used as synonymous terms. Accurately, psychoanalysis is a specialty of the field of psychiatry. Psychoanalysis is both a theory of human psychology and a method of treatment.

The method of treatment is one in which the patient is allowed, at his own pace and by his own association of ideas, to come to an understanding of his problems. This is best done when the patient is relaxed and free from distraction; therefore he often lies on a couch during the therapy.

All forms of psychotherapy have one aim getting the patient to talk about himself in meaningful terms, so that he understands his motivations, the causes of his symptoms, and can reconstruct his life in a more mentally healthy fashion. This is what is called "insight." In gaining it, the patient must do the major work. In the last analysis, he knows more about himself than anyone else does.