Our abnormality topic concludes with a look at the therapies used by each approach to abnormality. There are two biological therapies you must be able to describe and evaluate - Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and drug therapy (also known as pharmacotherapy or chemotherapy). Psychosurgery is also worth knowing, particularly as the ethical issues that apply to this rather extreme case can be used to evaluate the other therapies that you might be asked directly about.
For example, a criticism of drug therapy is that it doesn't really solve the problems patients have, they simply remove some of their troublesome symptoms (this is probably particularly true in the case of schizophrenia). In a similar way frontal lobotomies didn't really address the symptoms patients with schizophrenia or extreme anxiety had, but they made them much easier to manage - are modern antipsychotic drugs simply chemical lobotomies? If so, at least their effects are reversible...
Homework was to make detailed notes on psychosurgery and ECT - we will look at drugs in detail next lesson. You need to cover the following:
- ‘6 mark’ and ‘3 mark’ descriptions – what is it and how does it work?
- How effective is it? For what disorder(s)?
- What are its strengths?
- What are its limitations?
- What ethical issues arise?
Here is the presentation from last lesson - there is a lot more detail here than you need.
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