Behavioral Therapy (Collection: Mental Health )

See Behaviorism, also Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Behavior therapy is a school or approach to psychotherapy originating in America and reflecting American pragmatic and functionalistic philosophy and objective/empirical bent. Simple BT analyzes problems of human functioning in mechanistic terms as inputs and outputs of a system - it is not important to know what is going on inside the system - only to know what goes into it and what comes out of it. BT uses learning theory to manipulate inputs to the 'system' so as to influence outputs to be a certain way. In English - a behavior therapist will analyze a person's problematic behavior in terms of what reinforces or punishes that behavior. The behavioral therapist will then systematically alter the reinforcers or punishers to get the person to change their behaviors. Originally, Behavior therapy did not consider the role of the mind and thinking in how behavior changes. Over the years, however, BT has given way to Cognitive Behavior Therapy (a super-set of BT) that looks at both thinking (cognition) and behavior in the production of human problems.

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