Borderline Personality Disorder Essay

Does Psychotherapy have a Biological Basis?
Name
Institution
Does Psychotherapy have a Biological Basis?
Psychotherapy as a mental illness treatment addresses mental illness by focusing on the behaviors, thoughts, and moods of the patient. All these are controlled by the brain and as such, it suffices to say that psychotherapy targets the brain. As revealed by Prosser, Helfer, and Leucht (2016), psychotherapy, just like pharmacotherapy, focuses on treating the neural functioning that has been diseased. This neural functioning has a biological basis because the neural processes are biological. Prosser, Helfer, and Leucht (2016) add that neuroimaging studies show changes in the neural functioning that improve mental illness symptoms, hence confirming that psychotherapy is a biological treatment. There is also a genetic component of psychotherapy that proves that it indeed has a biological basis. According to Jimenez, et al. (2018), mental illnesses are associated with environment-genome interaction that is based on epigenetics processes, and psychotherapy focuses on learning from the environment. As such, by learning from the environment, psychotherapy addresses the root cause of mental illness by focusing on environmental influences on gene expression.
A person’s perspective on the value of psychotherapy treatments may be...