This paper should be about evidence-based treatments for the group of brain disorders you wrote about in Paper 1. “Evidence-based” means that the treatment has been shown to be effective in a peer-reviewed journal article reporting on a well-designed study. A well-designed study has the following characteristics (at minimum):

(1) clients with the disorder must have been randomly assigned to treatment groups, including at least one experimental treatment and at least one control group,
(2) baseline measures (for example, in a treatment of Major Depressive Disorder study, BDI-II scores) must be gathered before treatment starts and at the end of the treatment and statistically compared.

In order to be shown to be effective, the treatment group has to be found to be statistically significantly improved compared to the control group.

Paper Requirements

The paper must show that you can write at the level of a college senior. In order to do this, in the paper, you must demonstrate that you
• Have identified appropriate, relevant sources.
• Understand the journal articles and other references that you have cited.
• Can interpret the article findings, including whether the findings were statistically significant.
• Understand the concepts being taught in the course and the concepts being used in your paper.
• Were able to analyze the journal articles and synthesize the findings across topics.
• Have a good logical flow (logical argument) from paragraph to paragraph, and from the beginning to the end of the paper.

Minimum Content Requirements:
1. Report on treatments that research has shown to be effective for the group of disorders you selected. You must include at least one of each of these:
a. Medication
b. Psychotherapy (e.g., Cognitive Behavior Therapy)
c. Two or more “Alternative” types of therapy (e.g., meditation, exercise, relaxation, journaling), such as those covered in Minnini’s (2006) Emotional Toolkit.
2. For each treatment on which you report, you must include a minimum of one peer-reviewed journal article that shows that the treatment has been found to be effective (but you may have more than one journal article).
3. For each effective treatment on which you report, you must describe
a. how the study was conducted, including the number of subjects and whether they were randomly assigned to treatment vs. control groups,
b. What the treatment and the control group experience consisted of. (For example, if the treatment was CBT, briefly describe CBT and how it works.)
c. Explain how the treatment was shown to be effective.
i. What were the findings?
ii. Were they statistically significant?
d. You may use meta-studies, which review many studies and synthesize their findings.
4. Discuss social policy changes or social policies that would benefit clients with this type of disorder and their families (e.g., mental health screening in primary care settings, funding the “club house” model, supported housing, universal health care, full equality of access to care and funding for psychiatric disorders, community mental health centers, group homes, a change in the laws for involuntary commitment, etc.). You must cite a minimum of one peer-reviewed journal article on social policies.

Minimum Writing Requirements:
5. Use functional paragraphs with topic sentences, supporting sentences and concluding or transitional sentences.
6. In the paper, use introductory and concluding paragraphs, and have a good logical flow (logical argument) from paragraph to paragraph, and from the beginning to the end of the paper.
7. Use correct APA style, including in-text citations and references. All citations must have a corresponding reference, and all references should have at least one in-text citation. You may use subheadings if you desire. (No abstract is needed.)
8. The paper should be free of errors in grammar, spelling, sentence structure and other problems of writing mechanics. Typically, in order to earn an A you should have 0-1 errors per page.
9. Use a minimum of six journal articles (in addition to any books) and cite them appropriately.
10. Minimum of seven double-spaced pages, not including title page or reference page. (You may write more, but not less.)
11. Be free of plagiarism.

Suggestions:
• Use a reference librarian to help you find relevant peer-reviewed journal articles. (Reports on websites are not peer-reviewed journal articles.) Don’t try to do your literature search on your own. Our reference librarian is John Laubersheim, laubersh@uis.edu

Use this outline for your paper:
(You may choose to rearrange the order of the sections, but you should include all of them in your paper. You may use section headings in APA style in the paper.)

1. Introductory paragraph (Don’t use as section heading)
• Briefly review the basics of the disorder or group of disorders you are covering
• Tell the reader that you are going to write about evidence-based, effective treatments, and describe what that means.
• Tell the reader what you are going to cover in the paper.

2. Medications that have been shown to be effective (a single medication, or a class of medications, like SSRIs), if any.

3. Psychotherapies that have been shown to be effective.

4. Two or more alternative types of treatments (such as those found in Minnini’s book or Learning to Breathe) that have been shown to be effective.

5. Social policies that would benefit clients with this type of disorder and their families.

6. Discuss when to use the various types of treatments that have been shown to be effective (e.g., which treatments work best or are needed for clients with mild, moderate or severe disease).

7. Concluding paragraph
• Summarize your findings on effective treatments
• Summarize your findings on social policies that are needed because their absence gets in the way of good care for clients with the type of disorder you are covering.
• Suggest areas that need further exploration.