>>13604943Depends on your clinical orientation.
You can focus on talk therapy which is softer in a scientific sense.
If you're behaviorally oriented, you might run interventions for anxiety or addiction and other areas that are highly researched in very objective studies.
For example, schedule thinning of drug reinforcers, alteration of reinforcer potency, and differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (finding pleasure in activities that aren't drugs) will work to reduce drug consumption behavior experimentally as seen in many many studies. The line of research looks like this
>Evaluate schedules of reinforcement and extinction in rats and monkeys consumption of cocaine and alcohol in highly controlled operant chambers>Rats, monkeys, and apes consumption of drugs in more naturalistic experimental conditions with complex reinforcement schedules.>Neuroscience directly examining neuro-behavioral correlates of addiction in rats, monkeys, apes.>Translational clinical studies of schedules of drug cessation reinforcement schedules in humans>Clinical studies of medications like methadone that eliminate primary reinforcing effect of opioids but avoid inducing physiological withdrawal symptoms. >Wraparound behavioral intervention packages that use objective testing (drug tests), ongoing monitoring, goal setting, gradual reduction, and reinforcement of healthy replacement activities. It's not chemistry or physics. But clinical behavioral psychology doesn't depend on clients' verbally reporting effectiveness, saying they have fewer symptoms, or rating scales. These are just opinions.
It doesn't matter if a patient reports that they don't feel like smoking anymore after therapy. What matters is that they don't buy ciggs, don't have cigg butts scattered around their apartment, don't clockout to take smoke breaks, and that a dentist or pulmonologist could scope them and see reduction in mouth and lung damage. Objective signs of progress.
