Stress Psychological Treatments, Essay Example

Health, Stress, and Coping

An approach to health is too vast for anyone to dissemble on how to cope stress in everyday situations. Particularly on mental health, ways to cure maladaptive dispositions and distortions that would not prevent from an ability to manage decisively with discipline boundaries untainted are not always effective. Coping stress without boundaries intact tends to lose control of self and lose locus of control towards to others. Many individuals who had mental broken down tends to have some type of dispositions, such as, insufficient of sleep time, overwhelming work load, position pressures, and malnutrition. Other types of distortions may associate with environmental factors that contributes burdens and issues of which it may affect a person, or a group or the whole organization or to the community mentally. It is not unusual for some individuals who like stress and want to maintain stress to keep themselves occupied at all times but often times they come to realize they do not know how to give themselves a pause, hesitate, or procrastinate to reassess their health conditions, stress thresholds, and coping strategies. A coping approach have a series of perceiving stress, for example, in this model, a perceived stress follows a multitude of acute and chronic medical symptoms.However, Wiebe and McCallum (1986) examined the discrete of environmental factors andin the nature of lifestressors, individuals refute the effects of stress on their health, breaking off the relationship between stress and illness by adapting time management and physical fitness, and proper nutritionplans.

Psychological Disorders

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) are the two distinctive disorders with different characteristics of extremetraumatic stressors in development. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2000) defined PTSD as a mental disability that is characterized by direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or the person’s response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

The characteristics symptoms resulting from the exposure to the extreme trauma include persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event; persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of increased arousal and the full symptoms picture must be present for one more than 1 month and the disturbance must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Comparatively to the Acute Stress Disorder (ASD), which defines the diathesis-stress model, that this ASD is manifested with anxiety, dissociative, and other symptoms that occurs within 1 month after exposure to an extreme traumatic stressors following by dissociative symptoms that are of a subjective to the sense of numbering, detachment, or absence of emotional responsiveness; a reduction in awareness of his or her surroundings; derealization; depersonalization; or dissociative amnesia. A similarPTSD predisposition in the criteria sets that can be interrelated to the ASD, a significance of persistence traumatic event reexperienced (e.g., recurrent recollections, images, thoughts, dreams, illusions, flashback episodes, a sense of reliving the event, or distress on exposure to reminders of the event). Finally, hyperarousal in response to stimuli reminiscent of the trauma is present (e.g., difficulty sleeping, irritability, poor concentration, and hypervigilance) and hopelessness. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning or impairs the individual’s ability to pursue some necessary tasks, such as obtaining necessary assistance or mobilizing personal resources by telling family members about the traumatic experience (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

Approaches to Treatment and Therapy

An effective treatment (s) for patients with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder/Acute Stress Disorder is either a stress management therapy (SMT) or cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Stress Management therapyteaches patients on how to confront their traumatic experiences and to overcome the fear of their traumatic memory. To the extent, a psychodynamic method toevaluate an eventful situation for patients to reassess onwhat adverse them the most and decide on what is the best approach to cope the situation with therapist’s assistance. Whereas, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy approach use thedream hypothesis activity in which itcan bring the full core of impacted scenarios and talk through the dream process with a therapist. Other some patients preferred therole-play activity with a therapist.A therapeutical 90- to 120-minutes sessionoften succeed patients’ self-sufficiency and self-esteem after a minimum of 12 sessions.Institute of Medicine (2008) and Presidential Task Force on Evidenced-Base Practice (2006) reported that psychopharmacological treatment has been identified as ineffective therapy in the treatment with PTSD. However, Food Drug Administration approved the psychotic medications (serotonin and paroxetine) for treating PTSD. My perspective of two therapeutical approaches is that in each psychoanalytic process is too lengthy and cumbersome because as a therapist, it is also a learning process for a therapist and to teach at the same time is very challenging.

Contemporary and Future Issues in Psychology

According to the DSM-IV-TR (2000),  an issue surrounded Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is still yet to be discovered as many patients from the combat, refugees, and victims of natural disasters has grew tremulously and many neurological deficits has became too broaden to classify on what deficiencies and functionings for a specific co-existing condition. For example, consider a hypothetical change to the Acute Stress Disorder category, which would improve the likelihood that it would identify individuals who develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Given that such an improvement in predictive validity would also serve to improve the clinician’s ability to plan for the patient’s future management needs, one could consider thischange as being as much in the service of clinical utility as ofdiagnostic validity(First, 2010, p. 2). Such example is hoped to be indexed in the future of DSM-V manual in 2013. I believed that the effectiveness of diagnostic reporting judgments and decisions would enable clinicians to reportthe most valid and reliable information for other clinicians and researchers and mental health professionals to bring the results of research studies much more standardized.

References

American Psychiatric Association (2000) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th edition, Text Revision. American Psychiatric Association. Washington, DC: Author.

Institute of Medicine (2008). Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An assessment of the evidence. Washington, DC; National Academies Press. Retrieved August 12, 2011 from: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11995.html.

First, M. (2010) Clinical Utility in the Revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Journal of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. 41 (6), Pp. 465-475. Retrieved August 12, 2011 from: ProQuest Psychology Journal Database.

Wiebe, D.J. & McCallum, D.M (1986). Health practices and hardiness as mediators in the stress-illness relationship. Journal of Health Psychology, 5, Pp. 425-438. Retrieved August 11, 2011 from: ProQuest Psychology Journal Database.