Whether you are psychology student looking into mental health careers or already a therapist seeing clients, there are many options in regards to the perspective you take when looking at the diverse array of mental illnesses. There are five main perspectives in psychology: psychodynamic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, and biological and each one is useful in its own way when finding solutions to varied psychological problems. Most people in the field of psychology favor one of these perspectives over the other. I primarily adhere to the psychodynamic perspective because I believe most problems have a great deal to do with identifying what is happening with the unconscious. Often I see people’s psychological problems are greatly influenced by what happened to them in their childhood. For instance, if a parent abandoned someone in childhood, they might pursue relationships with unavailable people as an adult. They might not be aware they are doing this, but part of the job of the therapist who uses the psychodynamic approach is to make conscious these unconscious patterns. However, on the topic of dementia, I find that I favor the humanistic approach.
Dementia seems to me one of the most scary and mysterious mental illnesses because it feels impossible to understand what is going on with the person suffering from it. On a very simple level, people with dementia suffer from gradual memory loss that can include not remembering words, how to do things you would normally know how to do, people, and entire periods of your life. It is an illness prevalent with older people, including former president and now deceased Ronald Reagan, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, one of the major forms of dementia. Because it is difficult for a therapist to know exactly what is happening in the mind of a person with dementia, I think the humanistic perspective is the most useful because it focuses on where the person is in the moment. I imagine that using the humanistic approach with a person with dementia means paying attention to their emotional state as well as listening to what they are saying, even if it does not seem to make sense in a way that is real to me. The experience is probably very real to them and to deny their experience, to tell them their experience is somehow wrong or untrue, would only make them suffer. It must be frightening to not even remember whom the person standing next to you is, even if it is your spouse or your child. I would try to be with them in their reality, listen to them, and empathize. A friend of mine worked with elderly patients who suffered from various forms of dementia. She describes how if someone were to deny a person with dementia’s experience it would make him or her extremely agitated and they might feel like no one could ever understand what they were going through. Instead, my friend would sit with a patient and “be present” with them. She would listen to their stories or to whatever was happening with them. Even though their experiences were not a part of her reality, it was a very real part of their reality, so it was her job to, in her words, “go along for the ride”. My friend would use a humanistic, or person-centered approach, in which she would use “empathic attunement” to build a good relationship with the patient by helping them create positive emotional memories. In this way, even if the person with dementia has lost all memory of my friend, their emotional memory would still be intact and hopefully they would remember that they liked and trusted her. Through the humanistic perspective, a therapist is able to be present with a person who has dementia in a way that gives their experience validity.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Perspective Paper".
I would not want to use an entirely psychodynamic perspective with a person who has dementia because it could possibly be too analytical and stressful. A person with dementia may be struggling with a sense of self since they often have no memory of important parts of their past and the important people in their lives. The psychodynamic perspective, while useful for people who suffer from depression or anxiety, often creates a feeling of isolation and negativity for someone with dementia because they have no memories of the childhood traumas that might be the cause of their depression or anxiety. In fact, the dementia in itself often causes anxiety in its sufferers. I can only imagine how much anxiety I would feel if I suddenly found myself somewhere and did not know how I got there. I would be extremely anxious if I did not remember these people that are calling me “mom” or “dad”, “husband” or “wife”. In a way, the psychodynamic approach becomes moot if a client does not have any memories in which to analyze or explore. It would even make a person with dementia more anxious if a therapist were to try and force them to remember people, places, and events that simply do not exist in their memory in that moment.
The psychological perspectives all have some value when it comes to dementia—it is a diverse illness therefore there is no need to discount all approaches entirely. A psychodynamic approach, along with the humanistic, could be beneficial if a person with symptoms of dementia needs to deal with negative and hurtful unconscious tendencies, like obsessive-compulsive behaviors, for example. However, the humanistic approach of focusing on a patient’s reality rather than on inner conflicts seems to me the most supportive. The diversity of mental illnesses demands that students of psychology understand all five psychological perspectives in order to approach each potential client with an array of helpful tactics for a healthy mind.
