Just as technology has developed and science has discovered new processes to make our lives easier, psychology has also evolved in the treatment of mental health problems.
Initially, psychology began to treat mental health problems from what we now call first-generation therapies. The way to work was to use learning and “detachment” mechanisms, i. e. behavior, action and reaction. It was the encouragement and our learning experience, that determined our response.
- Responses are reinforced or made more likely by repetitions.
- All rewarded behaviors would be quickly learned and incorporated into our repertoire of responses.
- On the other hand.
- A response is extinguished when it stops strengthening.
- And even that extinction occurs more quickly if the response is sanctioned.
This first-generation therapy has helped us understand one of our most primitive learning mechanisms: conditioning. Of course, one of the branches of psychology that evolved most under this paradigm was the psychology of education, which found in these ideas an easy way to articulate. a model of teaching based on awards and punishments, which also helped to understand how we establish strong partnerships between certain stimuli.
Over time, the ideas behind the treatment of mental health problems evolved and, at that time, so-called second-generation therapies emerged. What was the form of treatment at the time?
Experts realized that we don’t always act on a combination of stimulus and response, but there was something else what could it be?The brain, the emotions, the cognitive part, the desires, that is, the essence of each one.
That’s why our way of thinking is so important in second-generation therapies, we are what we learn, but also what we build with everything we learn, with this in mind we stop being passive and become active, so that our scope of action multiplies.
Cognition is what makes us face the world one way or another, reality is important, but what we perceive from this reality and our interpretation of it is even more important, that is why second generation therapies have begun to work with the attitude, emotions or tendencies of the individual.
Understanding that we are more than machines that react according to what we learn has resulted in the study of one’s mind: a serious attempt to understand what is happening in our ‘black box’ for certain disturbances to occur or to experience paradoxical phenomena.
This new way of understanding our behavior has also led to a problem we are struggling with today: measurement. It’s very easy to know the distance between two places, but it’s not that easy to establish how anxious a person can be.
Now more a day and realizing that, despite the changes, not all mental health problems had a satisfactory solution, third-generation therapies were born.
These therapies have understood that the blame is not on how to solve the problem, but in our relationship with the problem, so they started working trying to integrate the difficulties, without trying to solve them directly, the goal was to ensure that problems that had no solution or that had no immediate solution did not harm our lives, here we will find the most current therapies , known and used today, such as mindfulness, acceptance therapies, etc.
The problem with this type of therapie is that it is very difficult to demonstrate their effectiveness, which allows many serious psychologists to use third generation therapies, but also many charlatans or uns formed people, so in some areas of more academic psychology, there is some rejection.
We took a little look at the three generations of psychological therapies, their diversity in understanding our behaviors, thoughts and emotions has shown us different views, without a doubt, enriching.
By knowing a little more about some aspects of the evolution of the way we work in psychology, we realize that they provide us with very different perspectives on our thoughts, behaviors and emotions, and this heterogeneity of points of view is undoubtedly gratifying for the psychologist. obtaining from each therapy different tools that can be used in consultation for the treatment of mental health problems.