AIIMS Rishikesh & Jodhpur NO - 2017
Mental Health Nursing
Easy

"Scheduled activity" therapy used for the patient with?

Appeared in: AIIMS Rishikesh & Jodhpur NO - 2017

Explanation

  • Activity scheduling is a core component of Behavioral Activation, a first-line psychotherapy for depression.
  • It aims to break the cycle of inactivity, withdrawal, and low mood by increasing engagement in rewarding or meaningful activities.
  • By completing scheduled tasks, patients experience a sense of mastery and pleasure, which directly counteracts key symptoms of depression like anhedonia and avolition.
  • The focus is on re-engaging with life, even when motivation is low, to create positive feedback loops that improve mood.

Why Other Options Were Wrong

  • Option A: While patients with negative symptoms of schizophrenia also suffer from avolition, the primary psychosocial interventions focus on social skills training and vocational rehabilitation to improve long-term functioning.
  • Option C: Patients with mania are already hyperactive. The therapeutic goal is to reduce stimuli and channel their energy into safe, non-competitive, gross motor activities to prevent exhaustion and de-escalate their mood.
  • Option D: The primary and most effective psychotherapy for OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). This involves confronting obsessional fears without engaging in compulsive rituals.

Related Visual

Visual explanation — Related Visual
Clinical Relevance
  • Nursing practice connection: Use the key finding related to Application of therapeutic activities in psychiatric nursing to guide bedside assessment, documentation, and the next nursing action.
  • Nurses play a key role in implementing activity scheduling by helping patients identify, plan, and carry out activities. This involves breaking down tasks into manageable steps and providing encouragement.
  • It is a patient safety and efficacy issue to apply the correct therapeutic modality. Using activity scheduling with a manic patient could dangerously escalate their state, while failing to use it for a depressed patient misses a key recovery tool.
  • What if the depressed patient says they have no energy for any activity? The nurse should start with very small, low-effort, high-success-rate tasks (e.g., 'Let's walk to the end of the hall and back') and use positive reinforcement, validating the effort rather than the outcome.
How to Approach the Question
  • First, identify the core concept in the question: 'Scheduled activity' therapy. This is a specific therapeutic technique.
  • Next, analyze the options, which are all psychiatric disorders.
  • The task is to match the specific therapy to the disorder for which it is a primary treatment.
  • Recall or deduce the psychopathology of each disorder. Depression involves low energy and motivation (avolition). Mania involves high energy. OCD involves rituals. Schizophrenia involves a complex mix of symptoms.
  • Consider how 'scheduling activities' would impact each condition. It would aim to increase motivation in depression, be counterproductive in mania, be irrelevant to the core issue in OCD, and be only a small part of a larger plan for schizophrenia.
  • Conclude that scheduling activities to overcome avolition and anhedonia is the hallmark of behavioral therapy for depression.
Concept Tested & Keywords
  • Concept Tested: Application of therapeutic activities in psychiatric nursing
  • Stem keywords: "Scheduled activity" therapy, patient
  • Lead-in keywords: BEST, MOST RELEVANT CLUE
  • Negative lead-in flag: false

Question ID

QOr4zyfNuIQ3pHqMO0LUjZ

Reference Book

E6 Robert Boland, Marcia L. Verduin - Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Text of Psychiatry-Wolters Kluwer Health (2024) (pp 1-16525 of 16525) p. 9223-9225

E6 Guide to Mental Health & PSYCHIATRIC NURSING R Sreevani— Part 1 (pp 26-289 of 579) pp. 163-165, 188-190

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