Humanistic, Behavioral, and Psychodynamic Approaches to Mental

¶ … humanistic, behavioral, and psychodynamic approaches to mental illness, and associated therapeutic modalities. Mental illness is one of the most important health issues in North America today. It can have an enormous impact on personal and professional lives of millions of individuals. As such, an understanding of the three most common models of mental illness is important to understanding the concept of mental illness as a whole. The humanistic model of mental illness derives from existential philosophy, and first emerged in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

This model is centered on the idea that a person's reality comes from their unique perception of the world around them. Freedom of choice means that individuals are able to make choices and be responsible for their personal decisions and actions. The humanistic model focuses on the actualizing tendencies of humans to grow and explore personal potential. In the humanistic model abnormal behavior and mental illness come from several different factors.

Mental illness can come when society begins to see certain people or groups of people as more valuable or powerful than others. Further, in the humanistic model, mental illness can come from the individual's unhealthy need to derive self-regard from other people. Thus, a state of incongruence develops from the difference between inherent self-worth, and self-worth as measured through the perceived opinions of other people (Carson). The principle therapeutic modality that came from humanistic models of mental illness is humanistic psychotherapy (sometimes referred to as experiential, Gestalt, or existential therapy).

Humanistic therapy focuses on the immediate feelings and experience of the patient, rather than the past or on thoughts or behaviors. The relationship of the therapist and patient is crucial in this form of therapy (Surgeon General). The behavioral learning model is shaped largely on the concepts of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The classical conditioning model came from the work of Ivan Pavlov's famous work on salivating dogs, and is a largely mechanistic description of stimuli and responses that lead to behavior.

Mental illness comes from inappropriate associations of stimuli and response. The operant conditioning model comes from the work of B.F. Skinner, who argued that behaviors come from events that follow these behaviors. Reinforcement is important in this theory, and mental illness comes from incorrect reinforcements (Carson; Abnormal Psychology). The major treatment modality to arise from behavioral models is behavior modification therapy. This approach focuses on present behavior, rather than the past-oriented approach of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Early forms of behavior therapy focused only on action and behavior, although more modern approaches also take people's thoughts and emotions into account. Cognitive-behavior therapy is an offshoot of this approach, and combines behavior therapy with techniques designed to replace dysfunctional thoughts and self-statements that are more positively adaptive (Surgeon General). The psychodynamic model of mental illness has its beginnings in the works of Sigmund Freud. He formulated the concepts of id, ego, superego, the Pleasure principle, and the psychosexual developmental stages of oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital.

Freud argued that much of human mental illness could be traced to abnormalities (including fixations) in the psychosexual developmental stages. Further, the psychodynamic model sees mental illness as deriving from conflicts or lack of.