Therapy

Therapy

Today many people seek professional therapy or counseling for a limited amount of time in order to deal with different life crises. Others seek professional help for the majority of their lives in order to deal with a psychological disorder. After reading this chapter on Therapy, I learned that this was not always the case, and that the way our society views therapy, and the meaning of therapy, has changed dramatically of the years. This chapter not only explains the evolution of therapy, it explores the different therapeutic approaches.

I found chapter thirteen to be very interesting. Learning about the different types of therapy was very helpful. I chose to write about this chapter because of the first section, "The History of Therapy". I spent a considerable amount of time reading over this short section and then doing a little research of my own. I googled "St. Mary of Bethlehem Hospital in London" and read more about the visitors that only had to pay two pence to be amused by the antics of patients. I found that piece of information to be the most interesting because I could not personally imagine being amused by another person's suffering. However, if that was the norm, I am sure many people did not think twice about just that. I also chose to write about this chapter because it explains the current methods of dealing with personality and psychological disorders.

Aside from the bit of information I learned about St. Mary of Bethlehem Hospital in London, the information I found to be most surprising in this chapter was the captioned information below the pictures in the margins. Trephining was the most disturbing picture. I am still amazed that people thought that anything whatsoever could be solved by chiseling away at a person's head. The picture of the skull was extremely disturbing: I cannot even fathom how horrible it would have been to be a patient of such practices. Also one would think that after the first gaping hole in a person's head with no results, the chiseling would stop. However it is obvious by the number of holes in the skull that this was a procedure that was tried multiple times on one patient. Other than the trephined skull, I also found it unusual that bloodletting