Aversion Therapy Essays

In the text “Relaxing Your Fears away,” the author presents how Joseph Wolpe, a behavior therapist, used a behavioral technique called systematic desensitization to treat anxiety disorders. Systematic desensitization is a technique that is supposed to lower a person’s level of anxiety steadily. The reason he used this technique was to see if this technique actually worked using his prior ideas that two feelings or responses cannot occur at the same time. Wolpe focused on the phobias his patients had and proposed that when his patients were in a relaxed state, then they would not respond with fear when presented with something that gave them anxiety.

In the early twentieth century, a Russian scientist named Pavlov developed the idea of “classical conditioning”- a kind of learning which one learns to connect a certain stimuli with another. Aversion therapy formed on this concept of learning, one the very first investigations by Charles Elton during the 1940s. This method of psychotherapy has been attempted to discourage behaviors sought to be socially unacceptable, such as alcoholism, homosexuality, and other addictions. A specific type is taste aversion therapy, which is used for alcoholics. The researchers attempt to get the patient to associate alcohol substances with nausea, which is actually caused by a nausea-inducing chemical combined with the beverage. Though the alcohol did not induce the nausea, the patient will still associate the sickness with the alcoholic beverage, consequently causing them to avoid any substance of alcohol. Multiple studies have been demonstrated throughout the time since Elton first investigated it, although there has not been hardcore evidence that taste aversion therapy is a more effective way of treating alcoholics and other addictions.

Behavioural approach treats bipolar, self-harm and bulimia by using a therapy called systematic desensitisation, where the client would create a hierarchy where they rank the conditioned stimulus (e.g. food) from least fearful to most fearful. The behavioural approach only focuses on the behaviour of the client rather than the thought or reason why the client has the disorder/illness. The Behaviourist Approach assumes that behaviour is decided for us rather than our free will in terms of the social learning theory, operant conditioning and classical conditioning whereas the cognitive approach assumes that behaviour is determined for us by cognitive/mental processes of which we cannot control including memory.

Instead you need to figure out what is the cause of why does the stimulus cause you to have such a negative reaction. We do this by starting with getting the proper help doing this, with a qualified medical professional. Then you use things such as cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, these are one in the same. It essentially depends on your issue and what the most effective techniques are in order to teach you to deal with your issues.

Rehabilitation assumes criminal behavior can be improved with non-punitive methods. Rehabilitation, although non-punitive, usually occurs along side punishment. For instance an incarcerated person may be given many rehabilitative options. Mental health programming, substance abuse counseling and even education programming exist in modern day correctional facilities. A judge may sentence someone to attend rehabilitative programming as a part of probation or it may be included as a stipulation in a plea agreement. At the core of rehabilitation is the thought that a criminal is flawed, often through no fault of their own. Poverty, mental health issues, or childhood trauma may all contribute to a criminal life and rehabilitation attempts to aid in a sort of recovery. If a person is cured of their issues, perhaps they will not fall back into their previous pattern. (Siegel & Senna, 2005).

However, although Wolpe wasn’t the first to suggest systematic desensitization as the best method to be used when treating anxiety disorders he was the first successfully apply it. With Wolpe believing phobia are learned he believed he could reduce the anxiety by a conditioning procedure. His theory of suppressing the phobias was the fundamental idea of behavioral therapy where you have learned an ineffective behavior or the phobia in this case and must now unlearn it. With this in mind, Wolpe created and used behavioral therapy as his basis and composed a three step process of desensitizing the phobia. First using relaxation training to create a personal state of relaxation Wolpe then moved to the construction of an anxiety hierarchy where he and the patient developed a list of scenes involving the phobia and finally the actual unlearning processes of desensitization was created. Repeating all three steps as one Wolpe averaged out at 12 sessions. As a result, his session results positively favored his method with a 91% success rate accompanying it and supporting his usage of correctly applying systematic desensitization to phobias or anxiety

In the Enchiridion, Epictetus repeatedly refers to “aversion” as “turning from a thing”. However, in Philosophy of Human Nature, Tiel refers to aversion therapy as “choosing to act in ways that are adverse, and in ways that tend toward desiring what you’d typically be averse to”. The challenge has been to adopt the aversion therapies for a 24-hour period and do the opposite of what you want to do. Being a mother of a 1-year-old daughter and juggling the duties of a 3rd year nursing student, this was somewhat difficult. I chose to adopt these therapies on a Saturday, where I have the freest time to do what I typically want to do.

Conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, is any treatment that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. A heterosexual is a person who is sexually attracted only to people of the opposite sex, and a homosexual is an individual who is sexually attracted to others of the same sex. There are different ways to go through conversion therapy. Conversion therapists use a range of approaches that can include general therapy, prayer, hypnosis, or aversion therapy. General therapy can be conducted by people who do not have psychology degrees, such as people with strong religious affiliation, or people who have underwent the therapy and believe it to be successful. Aversion therapy is one of the most controversial

A behavioural psychologist by the name of Joseph Wolpe helped clients in getting rid of their phobias in a process that would be much quicker than the process of psychodynamic which is the explanation that humans functioning is based on interactions of drives and forces which occur within the body such as unconsciousness and the various structures of personality. The basis of psychodynamic was introduced by an Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud. The reason Wolpe conducted this study was to find the most effective way in to perform systematic desensitization to eradicate people’s phobia. The hypothesis which Wolpe used was that to remove people’s phobia a fear should be combined with something that is also relaxing to the body and that eventually

Classical Conditioning is a type of associated learning that allows the brain to form connections between certain stimuli, triggering the same automatic body-response when exposed to one stimulus as when exposed to the correlated stimulus. Since these associations between the stimuli are learned, this means that a person with an addiction has learned to assimilate internal or external stimuli that trigger the same irrepressible response to their drug as when being exposed to the drug itself. However, understanding what an addict’s conditioned stimuli are, working to disassociate learned stimuli from the desire for the drug, and having an awareness of the factors that have the potential to challenge treatment are all detrimental components affecting the success of the treatment of addiction.

The behavioral approach studies how one behaves and reacts in situations that trigger anxiety. Jake is psyching himself out by his recently harder classes. In other words, he dreads taking these classes because he associates them with anxiousness. This learning is processed through paired association. In this example, the unconditioned stimulus would be the advanced class and the unconditioned response would be Jake becoming anxious. Systematic desensitization can treat this due to that fact that it is learned from the environment. Jake will go through gradual steps to reach full treatment. First, Jake must learn to relax through training. Second, Jake will create a list of objects or situations in school that makes him uneasy. Lastly, he will face the stimuli in a relaxed state. As an illustration, Jake tells the therapist that the tests in his new classes worry him. The therapist will guide Jake to become less tense while studying and taking the test. This will make his apprehension decrease and treat his anxiety disorder. Psychologists view this today as having the ability to clearly measure

Aversion therapy is the use of classical conditioning by using this method would cause a strong feeling of dislike or disgust, and is paired with an undesirable behavior to reduce or eliminate that behavior. An example of this is an individual who may be an alcoholic and to help them to stop drinking, a negative experience put into placed, by placing drugs in their drink causing them to get sick. Now this individual links the adverse experience to the conditioned stimulus and might avoid it. The above situation the woman is already suffering from high anxiety, using this treatment may not be

Yes, the aversion therapy was really ugly to think about. When I first heard about the horrible experiments which were performed on homosexuals was on the fictional show, “American Horror Story”. They showed a portrayal of a girl in the process of aversion therapy and she was often showed sick to her stomach from the process. It was loosely based on an actual mental institute and how the patients were mistreated. When I learned in these videos about actual sex changes they performed on the patients, I was shocked. How could someone do that to a human being against there wishes? It only further confuses them. I’m glad light was shed on this subject in order for people to have their rights.

Over the past 100 years, numerous experiments and studies were conducted to investigate classical conditioning, the most famous study being that of “Little Albert”, which resulted in the young boy in question being left with a strong fear towards anything which resembled a white rat. This study is a prime example of how classical conditioning can cause phobias to develop in individuals. In this essay I will investigate how Classical conditioning can cause an emotional response in an individual which manifests itself into a phobia and how researchers like Joseph Wolpe developed a technique known as systematic desensitization to help individuals overcome these phobias. Classical conditioning is a process where a neutral stimulus such as the bell in Pavlov’s study on the secretion of Saliva in dogs, is paired with an unconditioned

Homosexuality is when a person is sexually, emotionally or romantically attracted to the same sex. For a long time it was seen as a sin, but then society started to perceive it as a mental illness that could be cured. This cure was called Aversion therapy. Aversion Therapy is a form of psychological treatment that modifies a person’s behaviour. It involves forcing discomfort on a person when they are doing an unwanted behaviour goal is to make the individual associate the stimulus with unlikable or painful sensations (Cherry, 2016). The expectation is that occurrence of the unwanted behaviours or actions will begin to decrease or stop entirely.