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Panic Articles Cognitive therapy for depression
Panic Articles Cognitive therapy for depression | Cognitive therapy for depression |
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| Written by PanicJoe | |
| 22 July 2007 | |
 Psychotherapy can help a person suffering from depression in many ways. Mostly it can help cope with the pain one feels and even help reduce it. It can help cope with the feeling of hopelessness that comes with depression in most cases. Cognitive therapy can help change pessimistic view and despair into a more calm view of things and help create positive tools to deal with the depression. Cognitive therapy is a more focused method of treatment, and as such it is a shorter process, enabling quick results, improvement and hope for depression sufferers.In the past, behavioral therapy did not pay attention to cognitions, or our thoughts. It based itself only on behavior that could be seen and measured. The cognitive behavioral approach combines the effects of thought on our behavior and vise versa as the root to correct intertwined treatment. Therapist in this approach say that our thoughts, expectations, perceptions and attitude toward things and other people will affect our behavior, and that our behavior and someone else’s, will affect our cognitive experiences, so the two are intertwined and must be measured and treated together. This article will look at some of the cognitive factors in depression and how the CBT approach tends to treat them. Self-evaluation: We evaluate every thing around us and ourselves every day. Depressed people tend to have a low evaluation of themselves, and tend to blame themselves for everything that goes wrong. This over critical approach feeds the depressed reactions. The patient needs to be taught to see things in a balanced way (if not positive of oneself), alight the burden of guilt and stop feeding their sense of failure. Skill deficit evaluation: Depressed people can sometimes evaluate a skill deficit correctly, but they tend to use this reality based problem as a basis for increased negative exaggerations, This truly exact evaluation complicated their situation, as they are not capable of thinking that they can learn to change their actions and to compensate for the defect they might have. Therapy in this case focuses on behavior and helps the patient create a plan to improve the social deficits that they have, thus managing their problems better. Experience negative evaluation: Depressed people tend to evaluate generally positive experiences as negative, if just one thing went wrong. This results in over negative memories of things that one has experienced and an unrealistic expectation of perfection, that always leads to further disappointment. Therapy here focuses on our attitudes and expectations first and foremost – i.e. the cognitive side. Patients are taught to have a more realistic set of expectations and to value the experience as a whole and not to focus on the little things that went wrong. People learn to hope again via this process. Self-talk: We all do it! It is a part of our thinking process. We talk to ourselves (not out loud) in our heads and give ourselves instructions how to confront obstacles and problems throughout the day. Generally self-talk is a good thing. Depressed people tend to negative self-talk – and this can immobilize you and prevent you from even trying to solve a problem. Therapists help patients identify negative self talk and to challenge those statements and replace them with positive self-talk that encourages action. Automatic thoughts: These are automatic, instinctive responses to certain situations. Depressed persons have automatic negative responses, especially statements that relate to themselves. For example: They always feel stupid in a crowd and believe no one likes them. When negative responses rule our automatic thought system, this is the source of psychological problems. We tend to ignore any evidence that will contradict the negative automatic response, or to explain it to suit the negative thought, thus developing negative expectations. Treatment focuses on identifying these negative thought and on developing positive assessments to challenge them. Irrational beliefs: These are ideas that lack logic connected to reality. The problem is we believe them to be absolutely right despite their lack of logical basis. World peace will not be affected if one does not finish their breakfast… People who develop irrational ideas that lead them to believe they are incapable, will develop low self esteem and even depression. Therapy helps to locate these irrational ideas and show their lack of logical reality in order to challenge them. The next step is to develop ideas that are more connected to the real world. Distortion and catastrophizing: Perceptions, assumptions and judgments are the basis of all our thoughts. We all make mistakes and distort our perceptions at times. We all tend to over-generalize and sometime even negatively – thus creating a perceptual catastrophe. Depressed people just do this a lot more often and it paralyses their lives. Psychologists focus on giving patients tools to reach more objective judgment, thus preventing negative perceptions and assumptions about reality. Pessimism: Pessimism is a tendency to view the world in a negative and resigned light. It does not cause depression, but it is easier to develop depression when one tends to pessimism. Pessimism feeds the negative evaluations and negative self-talk. If you believe that things usually will not work out as you want them to (hence are a pessimist) you may take the nest step into feeling the future is bleak. So to your helplessness is now added hopelessness – and these are two of the milestones of developing depression. Optimism prevents such conclusions from being reached, and thus can protect against depression. Therapy in this case focuses on changing negative, helpless and hopeless assessments into positive, active and hopeful ones. Psychologists are researching ways of teaching optimism, to uses as a treatment method against depression. To summarize, the approach of cognitive and behavioral therapy is that negative evaluations, thought and attitudes lead to distorted judgment of reality and to hopelessness and thus to depression. Psychologists help patients to understand how these negative impressions affect their lives. Then they are taught to generate positive thoughts or at least to challenge the negative ones to better cope with their problems. |
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