This approach to the treatment of mental disorders draws upon principles derived from experimental psychology—mainly learning theory. As described by Joseph Wolpe in The Practice of Behavior Therapy (1973),

behavior therapy, or conditioning therapy, is the use of experimentally established principles of learning for the purpose of changing unadaptive behavior. Unadaptive habits are weakened and eliminated; adaptive habits are initiated and strengthened.

In the treatment of phobias, behavioral therapists seek to modify and eliminate the avoidance response that patients manifest when confronted with a phobic object or situation. Such confrontation is in fact crucial; although a person’s avoidance of the anxiety-producing situation does indeed reduce anxiety, the conditioned association of the phobic situation with the experience of anxiety remains unchallenged and therefore persists, often to the point of limiting normal activity. Behavior therapy interrupts this self-reinforcing pattern of avoidance behavior by presenting the feared situation to the patient in a controlled manner such that it eventually ceases to produce anxiety. In this way the patient’s associative links between the feared situation, the experience of anxiety, and subsequent avoidance behavior will be broken down and replaced by a more favorable set of responses.

The behavioral therapist is concerned with the forces and mechanisms that perpetuate the patient’s present symptoms or abnormal behaviors—not with any past experiences that may have caused them nor with any postulated intrapsychic conflict. Behavioral therapy concentrates on observable phenomena—i.e., what is done and what is said rather than what must be inferred (such as unconscious motives and processes and symbolic meanings).

The behavioral therapist carries out a detailed analysis of the patient’s behavior problems, paying particular attention to the circumstances in which they occur, to the patient’s attempts to cope with symptoms, and to the patient’s desire for change. The goals of treatment are precisely defined as symptomatic change and usually do not include aims such as personal growth or personality change. The relationship between patient and therapist is sometimes said to be unimportant in behavior therapy. For instance, a patient may achieve successful results through a behavioral therapeutic program learned from a book or a computer program. Nevertheless, patients are more likely to complete an arduous program when working with a therapist who has won their trust and respect.

Behavior therapy has become the preferred treatment for phobic states and for some obsessive-compulsive disorders, and it is effective in many cases of sexual dysfunction and deviation. It also performs an important role in the rehabilitation of patients with chronic, disabling disorders. The essence of the treatment of phobias is the controlled exposure of the patient to the very objects or situations that are feared; this is known as exposure therapy. Therapy tries to eliminate the phobia by teaching the patient how to face those situations that clearly trigger discomfort. The exposure of the patient to the feared situation can be gradual (sometimes called desensitization) or rapid (sometimes known as flooding). Contrary to popular belief, the anxiety that is produced during such controlled exposure is not usually harmful. Even if severe panic initially strikes the sufferer, it will gradually diminish and will be less likely to return in the future.

Effective exposure treatments were developed as therapists learned that the patient’s endurance of phobic anxiety in a controlled situation is much more likely to be helpful than harmful. The important point in this therapy is to persevere until the phobic anxiety starts to lessen. In general, the more rapidly and directly the worst fears are embraced by the patient, the more quickly the phobic terror fades to a tolerable mild tension.

In the technique of desensitization, the patient is first taught how to practice muscular relaxation. The patient then reviews the situations that are feared and lists them in order of increasing dread, called a “hierarchy.” Finally, the patient faces the various fear-producing situations in ascending order by means of vividly imagining them, countering any resulting anxiety with relaxation techniques. This treatment is prolonged, and its use is restricted to feared situations that patients cannot regularly confront in real life, such as fear of lightning.

One of the most common phobic disorders treated by exposure techniques is agoraphobia (fear of open or public places). The patient is encouraged to practice exposure daily, staying in a phobic situation for at least an hour so that anxiety has time to reach a peak and then subside. The patient must be determined to get the better of the fears and not to run away from them. The patient must instead force himself to engage in activities (shopping, viewing exhibits, speaking to sales representatives) that are normal in that setting. Persistence and patience are essential to conquering phobias in this way.

There is considerable evidence that exposure techniques work in most cases. Even phobias enduring for as long as 20 years can be overcome in a treatment program requiring no more than three to 15 hours of sessions with a therapist. There is also considerable evidence that people with phobias can treat themselves perfectly adequately without a therapist by using carefully devised self-help manuals.

Some patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders can also be helped by behavior therapy. Several different techniques may be required. For instance, patients with an obsessional fear of contamination are treated by exposure, being taught to soil their hands with dirt and then to resist washing them for longer and longer periods. Anxiety-management training enables patients to withstand the anxiety triggered by exposure to sensitive or antagonistic situations.

Many such techniques have been recognized as effective in the treatment of compulsive rituals, with improvement occurring in more than two-thirds of patients. There is also a reduction in the frequency and intensity of obsessional thoughts that accompany the rituals. The treatment of obsessional thoughts that occur alone—that is, without compulsive behavior—is much less satisfactory, however.

Cognitive psychotherapy

Cognitive psychotherapy is most associated with the theoretical approaches developed by the American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck and the American psychologist Albert Ellis. It is often used in combination with behavioral techniques, with which it shares the primary aim of ridding patients of their symptoms rather than providing insight into the unconscious or facilitating personal growth. Cognitive therapy is also commonly used alone in treating a variety of psychological problems; it is especially associated with the treatment of depression and anxiety, since these disorders were the primary focus of Beck’s theory and research.

Cognitive therapy is based on the premise that maladaptive thinking causes and maintains emotional problems. Maladaptive thinking may refer to a belief that is false and rationally unsupported—what Ellis called an “irrational belief.” An example of such a belief is that one must be loved and approved of by everyone in order to be happy or to have a sense of self-worth. This is irrational first because it cannot possibly be achieved—no one is loved or approved of by everyone—and second because believing it removes the conditions of happiness and self-worth from the individual’s control, placing them instead in the control of other people. Cognitive therapy seeks to identify such beliefs, help the patient connect them to emotional problems, and guide the patient toward adopting more-realistic versions.

Maladaptive thinking may also refer to faulty cognitive processes. These include inappropriate generalization, “catastrophizing” (expecting or recalling the worst of any event), and selective attention. For example, a patient may generalize from one experience or failure that he is likely (or “doomed”) to fail in future situations regardless of how those situations may differ from the past situation or regardless of how he himself may have changed in the interim. When receiving feedback from others, a patient may focus selectively and perhaps catastrophically on a single negative aspect rather than consider it on balance with several positive aspects.

Such maladaptive cognitive processes not only promote negative emotions in patients but also discourage adaptive behavioral reactions. Why should one learn from the past if one is doomed to fail in the future? By helping patients alter their cognitive experience, cognitive therapists increase the likelihood of more-positive, or at least more-reasonable, emotional reactions, as well as more-adaptive behavior. Cognitive therapies typically supplement cognitive retraining with behavioral practice so that the adaptive cognitions can be firmly established and linked with adaptive behavior.

Interpersonal psychotherapy

Interpersonal therapies help patients understand their symptoms in terms of the impact they have on others (and, in turn, on themselves); they also help patients develop interpersonal styles and communication behaviors that are more direct and effective. In this regard, interpersonal therapies are quite behavioral in focus, even though they do not rely as explicitly on learning theory as the behavioral therapies do.

The treatment series, which usually lasts less than one year, begins with the identification of interpersonal problems that are likely to be related to a patient’s current experience of depression. Problems are typically categorized as stemming from grief, conflicts, major life transitions, or personality problems relating to social skills. Once these areas are identified, treatments focus on therapeutic interventions.

In interpersonal psychotherapy, symptomatic behaviors are often viewed as maladaptive strategies for meeting one’s own needs through the manipulation of others (although the patient is not considered to be intentionally manipulative). Symptoms might also be considered in terms of their communicational impact or in their role as influential messages. Such messages are symptomatic when they are characteristically confusing, contradictory, and deceptive. Interpersonal therapists, regardless of their field of specialization, view psychological problems within their social or interpersonal context. Interpersonal concepts receive wide use in psychotherapy, sometimes within a dynamic framework (as in the approaches espoused by German psychoanalyst Karen Horney and American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan), sometimes within a personality-trait framework (such as the interpersonal diagnostic and treatment system developed by American psychologist Lorna Smith Benjamin), and sometimes within schools of couple and family therapy, in which the “patient” is defined as a dysfunctional communication system of several people, rather than a single person with a mental disorder.