Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Systematic desensitisation - Wolpe - Coggle Diagram

- - - - This is the thing that the client fears being paired with something that produces a pleasant, relaxed, etc response. eg. breathing excercises, humour, food, etc.
    - - The therapist and the patient work out a stimulation hierarchy - a list of encounters with the feared thing, going from the least intense to the most intense.
        
        It's very important that the stimulation hierarchy is created by the patient not the therapist. This is for two reasons:
        
        The patient knows best what makes them anxious. Having control over how the therapy proceeds is itself relaxing.
        
        It would be unethical to expose patients to distressing situations if they hadn't given informed consent to every step in the process first. Ethical guidelines emphasise the importance of respecting people's autonomy (control over what happens to them)
- - - - A problem might be that, in real life, sufferers do not get to choose when and how they encounter the object of their fear (a spider might drop on you unexpectedly!) and they might have no control over a real life situation. This means that the benefits of the therapy might not generalise to real life situations.
        
        Another weakness is that systematic desensitisation works best for phobias of objects or animals. It's not so effective for phobias of situations or concepts, like the fear of crowds, foreigners, the number 13, flying or germs.
        This is because it's hard to re-create these things in the therapy session and hard to manipulate these things into a stimulus hierarchy. With a fear of flying, you're either flying or you're not. The sufferer isn't frightened of aeroplanes or films set on aeroplanes; it's actually being up in the air themselves that they find frightening.
  - - - Systematic desensitisation is much more ethical than flooding, because the participants are only exposed gradually to the thing that they fear and they only move on to greater exposure when they feel ready. With flooding, the patient is exposed to the object they fear all at once, in a very intense way. This can be distressing.
        
        Neither systematic desensitisation nor flooding tackle the possible underlying problem behind the phobia. They are both behavioural therapies that only deal with the symptoms, not the cause. If there is an underlying problem behind the phobia (like trauma in the patient's past), then that will still be there and will carry on causing difficulties, even if the phobia is temporarily eased.