- All-or-Nothing Thinking: Classifying objects or events as absolutely right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, and so forth
- Antidepressants: Mood-elevating drugs
- Antipsychotics: Drugs that, in addition to having tranquilizing effects, also tend to reduce hallucinations and delusional thinking. (a.k.a. major Tranquilizers)
- Anxiolytics: Druge (such as Valium) that produce relaxation or reduce anxiety
- Authenticity: In Carl Rogers' terms, the ability of a therapist to be genuine and honest about his or her own feelings
- Aversion Therapy: Suppressing an undesirable response by associating it with aversive (painful or uncomfortable) stimuli
- Behavior Modification: The application of learning principles to change human behavior, especially maladaptive behavior
- Behavior Therapy: Any therapy designed to actively change behavior
- Client-Centered (person-centered) Therapy: A nondirective therapy based on insights gained from conscious thoughts and feelings; emphasizes accepting one's true self
- Cognitive Therapy: A therapy directed at changing the maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that underlie emotional and behavioral problems
- Community mental Health Center: A facility offering a wide range of mental health services, such as prevention, counseling, consultation, and crisis intervention
- Covert Reinforcement: Using positive imagery to reinforce desired behavior
- Covert Sensitization: The use of aversive imagery to reduce the occurrence of an undesired response
- Crisis Intervention: Skilled management of a psychological emergency
- Deinstitutionalization: Reduced use of full-time commitment to mental institutions to treat mental disorders
- Demonology: In medieval Europe, the study of demons and the treatment of persons "possessed" by demons
- Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): A treatment for severe depression, consisting of an electric shock passed directly through the brain, which induces a convulsion
- Empathy: A capacity for taking another's point of view; the ability to feel what another is feeling
- Encounter Group: A group experience that emphasizes intensely honest interchanges among participants regarding feelings and reactions to one another
- Existential Therapy: An insight therapy that focuses on the elemental problems of existence, such as death, meaning, choice, and responsibility; emphasizes making courageous life choices
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): A technique for reducing fear or anxiety; based on holding upsetting thoughts in mind while rapidly moving the eyes from side to side
- Family Therapy: A technique in which all family members participate, both individually and as a group, to change destructive relationships and communication patterns
- Gestalt Therapy: An approach that focuses on immediate experience and awareness to help clients rebuild thinking, feeling, and acting into connected wholes; emphasizes the integration of fragmented experiences
- Group Therapy: Psychotherapy conducted in a group setting to make therapeutic use of group dynamics
- Halfway House: A community-based facility for individuals making the transition from an institution (mental hospital, prison, and so forth) to independent living
- Hierarchy: A rank-ordered series of higher and lower amounts, levels, degrees, or steps
- Large-Group Awareness Training: Any number of programs (many of them commercialized) that claim to increase self-awareness and facilitate constructive personal change
- Logo-Therapy: A form of existential therapy that emphasizes the need to find and maintain meaning in one's life
- Mental Hospitalization: Placing a person in a protected, theraputic environment staffed by mental health professionals
- Mirror Technique: Observing another person re-enact one's own behavior, like a character in a play; designed to help persons see themselves more clearly
- Over-Generalization: Blowing a single event out of proportion by extending it to a large number of unrelated situations
- Paraprofessional: An individual who works in a near-professional capacity under the supervision of a more highly trained person
- Partial Hospitalization: An approach in which patients receive treatment at a hospital during the day, but return home at night
- Peer Councilor: A nonprofessional person who has learned basic counseling skills
- Pharmacotherapy: The use of drugs to alleviate the symptoms of emotional disturbance
- Psychoanalysis: A Freudian therapy that emphasizes the use of free association, dream interpretation, resistances, and transference to uncover unconscious conflicts
- Psychodrama: A therapy in which clients act out personal conflicts and feelings in the presence of others who play supporting roles
- Psychosurgery: Any surgical alteration of the brain designed to bring about desirable behavioral or emotional changes
- Psychotherapy: Any psychological techmique used to facilitate positive changes in a person's personality, behavior, or adjustment
- Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): An approach that states that irrational beliefs cause many emotional problems and that such beliefs must be changed or abandoned
- Reciprocal Inhibition: The presence of one emotional state can inhibit the occurrence of another, such as joy prevent fear or anxiety inhibiting pleasure
- Reflection: In client-centered therapy, the process of rephrasing or repeating thoughts and feelings expressed by clients so they can be come aware of what they are saying
- Role Reversal: Taking the role of another person to learn how one's own behavior appears from the other person's view
- Selective Perception: Perceiving only certain stimuli among a larger array of possibilities
- Self-Help Group: A group of people who share a particular type of problem and provide mutual support to one another
- Sensitivity Group: A group experience consisting of exercises designed to increase self-awareness and sensitivity to others
- Somantic Therapy: Any bodily therapy, such as a drug therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, or psychosurgery
- Systematic Desensitization: A reduction in fear, anxiety, or aversion brought about by planned exposure to aversive stimuli
- Tension-Release Method: A procedure for systematically achieving deep relaxation of the body
- Therapeutic alliance: A caring relationship that unites a therapist and a client in working to solve the client's problems
- Therapy Placebo Effect: Improvement caused not by the actual process of therapy but by a client's expectation that therapy will help
- Thought Stopping: The use of aversive stimuli to interrupt or prevent upsetting thoughts
- Token Economy: A therapeutic program in which desirable behaviors are reinforced with tokens that can be exchanged for goods, services, activities, and privileges
- Unconditional Positive Regard: An unqualified, unshakable acceptance of another person
- Vicarious Desensitization: A reduction in fear or anxiety that takes place vicariously ("secondhand") when a client watches models perform the feared behavior
- Virtual Reality Exposure: Use of computer-generated images to present fear stimuli. The virtual environment responds to a viewer's head movements and other inputs