Question

Difficulty: MediumPsychopharmacology and Psychological Therapies

Match each clinical vignette describing a patient's therapeutic intervention to the most appropriate psychological therapy modality.

  • A 28-year-old patient with frequent self-harm behaviors, chronic feelings of emptiness, and a pattern of intense, unstable relationships engages in a skills-based therapy to improve distress tolerance and emotion regulation.Dialectical behavioral therapy
  • A 35-year-old veteran with intrusive flashbacks and hypervigilance undergoes a structured therapy that pairs recounting the traumatic narrative with guided, bilateral sensory stimulation.Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing
  • A 41-year-old man with major depressive disorder participates in a short-term, goal-oriented intervention focused on identifying maladaptive automatic thoughts and scheduling pleasant activities.Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • A 52-year-old patient who heavily consumes alcohol expresses a desire to cut down but feels unable to do so. The provider uses a non-judgmental approach to explore this ambivalence and elicit the patient's own reasons for change.Motivational interviewing
  • A 24-year-old woman with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder is systematically subjected to her contamination triggers while being actively prevented from engaging in her hand-washing rituals.Exposure and response prevention

Answer

The correct pairings align each patient's clinical presentation and described therapeutic technique with its specific modality: emotion dysregulation and self-harm with Dialectical behavioral therapy; trauma narrative and bilateral stimulation with Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing; depressive cognitive distortions and behavioral activation with Cognitive behavioral therapy; substance ambivalence with Motivational interviewing; and obsession triggers with compulsion blocking with Exposure and response prevention.
Each psychological therapy utilizes specific techniques tailored to particular psychiatric disorders. Dialectical behavioral therapy is specifically tailored for borderline personality disorder, targeting self-harm and emotional lability. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing utilizes bilateral stimulation specifically for trauma processing in PTSD. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on restructuring maladaptive thoughts and scheduling activities, making it first-line for depression and anxiety. Motivational interviewing is a patient-centered approach uniquely structured to resolve ambivalence in substance use and behavioral changes. Exposure and response prevention is a highly specific behavioral therapy for OCD that breaks the reinforcing cycle of obsessions and compulsions.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the underlying psychiatric condition or prominent symptoms described in each patient vignette.
Vignette 1 describes borderline personality disorder. Vignette 2 describes PTSD. Vignette 3 describes major depressive disorder. Vignette 4 describes a substance use disorder. Vignette 5 describes obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Psychological therapies are highly specific to the pathophysiology and symptom clusters of individual psychiatric disorders.
2
Identify the core therapeutic mechanism or technique being utilized in each scenario.
The techniques are distress tolerance (Vignette 1), bilateral stimulation (Vignette 2), addressing maladaptive thoughts (Vignette 3), exploring ambivalence (Vignette 4), and trigger exposure without ritual completion (Vignette 5).
Matching the technique to the theoretical framework of the therapy confirms the correct modality.
3
Correlate the diagnosis and technique to the correct evidence-based psychological therapy.
The techniques map directly to DBT, EMDR, CBT, Motivational Interviewing, and ERP, respectively.
This confirms the correct pairing for each clinical presentation.

Key Concept

Indications and core techniques of evidence-based psychological therapies.
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