Multimodal therapy is a type of psychotherapy that supports the need for personalization treatments for each individual. The core of this type of therapy is the belief that man, as a biological creature, has different ways of thinking, sensing, and feeling, all of which should be taken into consideration in the treatment of psychological or behavioral disorders. Multimodal therapy can also be applied to physiological conditions by combining different approaches and methods in providing adequate treatment for the patient.
The development of therapy is credited to Dr. Arnold Allan Lazarus, a South African psychologist who contributed to the advancement of psychology, particularly in behavior therapy. During the first of his career, Dr. Lazarus realized that the integration of different characteristics from different psychotherapy ideologies can help to obtain more effective treatments for patients. This concept of integration was initially defined as “broad spectrum behavior therapy,” then to become “multimodal therapy.”
In order to create a bespoke treatment, multimodal therapy usually looks at seven different aspects or “modalities” of a person, represented in the abbreviation “. BASIC ID” BASIC means: Behaviors, affective – or emotional – responses, Sensation, Imagery, and cognition; ID, on the other hand, means Interpersonal and Drugs / biology. In this way, the therapy recognizes that a certain psychological condition affects not only a person’s behavior and emotions, but also his physiological and mental processes. For example, a depressed person will probably avoid people and become sad, but he may also experience chronic fatigue or insomnia and bring negative and critical thoughts about himself.
To determine the patient’s psychological condition, multimodal therapy usually requires patients to honestly answer a questionnaire covering the BASE ID factors. The questionnaire usually come in the form of a Likert scale, where patients can choose from numbers, usually ranging from one to five, agreeing or disagreeing with the questions. The questionnaire will also reveal whether there is a predominance of one modality over the other. For example, if the questionnaire responses reveal that the patient can respond well with the interaction, the psychologist can recommend that the patient have multiple interpersonal and social activities to treat depression.
Multimodal therapy also believes the patient’s personality or tempering a significant factor in forming a treatment that the patient will be most open to. Patients may have the same structural profile as their demand, but their personalities will be different, and so will their receptivity to treatment. One of the advantages of multimodal therapy is that psychologists and therapists don’t have to submit to psychological ideology alone, but rather, they are more open to using different strategies from different ideologies. This form of flexibility is called “technical eclecticism.”
