Browsing by Subject "myötätuntokeskeinen terapia"

Objective. Compassion is defined as a capability to experience one’s personal or another’s suffering and also feel motivated to relieve encountered suffering. Eating disorders are psychiatric disorders consisting of problems with food and eating-related behaviors which cause clinically significant distress. Eating disorder prevalence has seen a major surge in recent years. In addition, the disorders are quite often long-lasting, greatly reducing quality of life, and they are resistant to many of the commonplace treatment methods. The situation at hand actively motivates to seek and develop new and more effective treatments for eating disorders. Shame and self-criticism generally co-occur with eating disorders and are linked with greater psychopathology, while compassion works to some extent as an antagonist to them and is known to decrease psychopathology as well. Compassion can be learned and compassion-focused therapy (CFT, suom. myötätuntokeskeinen terapia) focuses on just that with its methods. The objective of this literature review is to examine the potential benefits and opportunities of compassion-focused therapy for the treatment of eating disorders. In addition, the focus is on the increased experience of shame that may be associated with eating disorders and the benefits of treating it. Methods. The literature for this review was gathered from PubMed-, Scopus, and Google Scholar - databases combining the search terms “eating disorders” and “compassion-focused therapy”. Results and conclusions. According to several studies, compassion-focused therapy has been found to be beneficial in treating eating disorders. The shame and self-criticism associated with eating disorders are alleviated with compassionate training, which reduces both specific eating disorder symptomatology and, more broadly, psychopathology, which promotes treatment response to conventional therapies. Promisingly, Compassion-focused therapy has been found to work particularly well alongside standard treatment, thereby reaching for traits of psychopathology, such as symptom-sustaining feelings of shame which are not directly reached by other methods.