Abstract
Over the last decade more and more articles and books have been published dealing with the application of learning theory and principles in the individual and group psychotherapy of neurotic patients. In this paper, a patient population attending the Day-Care Clinic in the Mental Hospital, St. John's, Newfoundland, is described and the application of a learning theory type of therapy is discussed. These patients came mainly from small, isolated fishing villages or out-ports, located around the coast of Newfoundland. Most of them had gone only as far as Grade VII or VIII in school and were unsophisticated regarding their symptomatology and emotional illness.
Several studies on normal persons living in out-ports had indicated that their performance abilities are much better developed than their verbal-conceptual ones. It was felt, therefore, that patients of this type might benefit from conditioning and supportive therapy rather than from any sophisticated analytic treatment which would require a fair level of education and ability to verbalize.
The results of this type of treatment approach on rural “unsophisticated” patients who have limited formal education suggest that an approach involving conditioning therapy and basic education may be quite useful. Also the results indicate that the emphasis on the psychotherapy of the intelligent urban patient may have resulted in the relative neglect of a fairly large proportion of individuals seeking treatment. It is hoped that a greater interest in these less analytically-exciting patients will result from treatments involving basic learning theory and conditioning principles.