Cognitive Therapy For Depression Essay Example For Students

Cognitive Therapy For Depression Essay COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY FOR DEPRESSIONIntroductionCognitive behavioral therapy helps improve peoples moods and behavior by changing their way thinking; also, how they interpret events and talk to themselves. This form of psychotherapy helps guide people into thinking more realistically and teaches them coping strategies to deal with their depression. Cognitive therapy is in most cases a short-term treatment that can have long-term results. I will discuss depression in adolescence and how it effects personal adjustments, which may often continue into adulthood. I will also discuss depression in the elderly. There are different approaches to treating depression, the main approach that will be discussed is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a way to break the cycle for depression. What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?Cognitive behavior therapy helps people break the connections between difficult situations and their habitual reactions to them. This can be reactions such as fear, rage or depression, and self-defeating or self-damaging behavior. It also teaches people how to calm their mind and body, so they can feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions. Cognitive therapy also teaches people how certain thinking patterns are causing their symptoms. This is accomplished by giving people a distorted picture of whats going on in their life, and making them feel anxious, depressed or angry for no good reason.(Francis, 2000) When people are in behavior therapy and cognitive therapy, it provides them with various tools for stopping their symptoms and getting their life on a more satisfying track. In cognitive therapy, the therapist takes an active part in solving a patients problems. He or she doesnt settle for just nodding wisely while the patient ca rries the whole burden of finding the answers they came to therapy for initially. Cognitive therapists teach patients to identify their negative thoughts, recognize their erroneous nature and devise a corrective plan that leads to more positive assessments and an ability to deal more realistically with every day problems.(Burns, 1996-2000) Dr. Frances M. Christian, a clinical social worker and cognitive therapist at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, says, ?Thoughts and beliefs have a lot to do with how people feel and behave. Early in life, people develop core beliefs about themselves and other people and about how the world operates.?Cognitive behavioral therapy has been very thoroughly researched. In study after study, it has been shown to be as effective as drugs in treating both depression and anxiety. In particular, cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be better than drugs in avoiding treatment failures and in preventing relapse after the end of treatment. A cognitive therapist directs a patients attention to automatic thoughts, the things people say to themselves, that result in unpleasant feelings. (Stopa, 2000) For example, someone prone to anxiety attacks might automatically think, Im going to mess up, when taking an exam, participating in a school event or being interviewed for a job. After failing such a task, the person might conclude, again automatically, Im a loser. In therapy, the person is helped to recognize delusions in thought, which include exaggerating the sense of threat, anticipating disaster as the outcome, and over generalizing from one negative experience and ignoring times when things went well. Finally, once the damaging automatic thoughts are recognized, the person is helped to examine how realistic they are, and they consider alternative explanations, then imagine other outcomes and realize that the symptoms of anxiety are not the prelude to a heart attack or some other medical disaster. (Stopa, 2000) This sam e approach is practiced for depression. The difference in the therapeutic approach versus medicating is dramatic, and the relief people feel is immediate. Instead of dwelling on the negative, which the other therapists sometimes do, they acquire therapeutic tools the depressed can apply on his or her own, in case they may find themselves slipping into old patterns of thought or behavior. (Stopa, 2000)Furthermore, studies have shown that the results of cognitive therapy are long lasting, with relapse rates much lower than with other modes of treatment, including psychiatric drugs. And while medication is sometimes used, at least briefly, to relieve intense emotional disturbances and improve receptivity to therapy, most patients can be spared the side effects of drugs, which may include the inability to function sexually, upset stomach, difficulty sleeping and difficulty concentrating.(Brody, 1996) While no one approach to psychotherapy is appropriate for everyone, many thousands of patients have benefited from the strategie s unique to cognitive therapy. In the 30 or so years since the approach was developed by Dr. Aaron T. Beck, a world-renowned psychiatrist at the Beck Center for Cognitive Therapy in Philadelphia, it has become the most scientifically tested model of psychotherapy. (Brody, 1996)What is Depression?According to Dr. Judith S. Beck and Dr. Aaron Beck, her daughter, ?Patients have continual unpleasant thoughts and that each thought deepens the depression.? However, these thoughts are not based on facts and result in feelings of sadness this is far beyond what the situation guarantees, it has to do with hypothetical situations. ?Depressed persons make such mistakes over and over,? Quinn has written. ?In fact, they may misinterpret friendly overtures as rejections. They tend to see the negative, rather than the positive side of things. Plus they do not check to determine whether they may have made a mistake in interpreting events.?(Quinn, 1998) Depressed thinking often takes the form of neg ative thoughts about oneself, the present, and the future. The mood in depression is almost always experienced as sad. According to a patients letter written and later published with the permission of William Morrow and Company, (publisher of Moodswing): from the book, ?Depression and its Treatment?, her experience with this mood disorder was despair and uselessness. Eventually she found herself going to sleep earlier at night just to stop the anxious thoughts entering her mind. The patient says her appetite got worse and she became physically ill with the progression of her depression. The statement later reads, ?If I had to see a psychiatrist, it meant that I was probably going insane, and this thought made me even more frightened. It was more than I could stand. The fear of being mentally ill was so horrible that I decided to take my entire bottle of sleeping pills rather than face the shame of being a mental patient.?(Griest ; Jefferson, 1992) Depression can strike anyone at any given time. It affects 5% of the population at any time and at least 10% of the population at some point in their lifetime. At least 10% of the people with major depression end their lives by suicide. (Greist ; Jefferson1992)Depression in AdolescentsHow prevalent are mood disorders in children and is an adolescent with changes in mood considered clinically depressed? Oster has said the reason why depression is often over looked in children and adolescents are because ?children are not always able to express how they feel.?(Oster ; Montgomery 1997) Sometimes the symptoms of mood disorders take on different forms in children than in adults. Adolescence is a time of emotional turmoil, mood swings, gloomy thoughts, and over sensitivity, it is also a time of rebellion and experimentation. Therefore, the diagnosis should not lie only in the physicians hands but be associated with parents, teachers and anyone who interacts with the child on a daily basis. Unlike adult depression, symptoms of adolecent depression are often camouflaged. Instead of expressing sadness, teenagers may express boredom and irritability, or may choose to get involved in risky behaviors. (Oster Montgomery, 1995) The key indicators of adolescent depression include a drastic change in eating and sleeping patterns, significant loss of interest in previous activities, aggression and boredom. The signs of clinical depression include marked changes in mood and associated behaviors that range from sadness, withdrawal, and decreased energy to intense feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts. Depression is often described as an exaggeration of the duration and intensity of ?normal? mood changes (Oster Montgomery, 1995), constant boredom, disruptive behavior, peer problems, and increased irritability and aggression. (OConnor 1997) For many teens, symptoms of depression are directly related to low self-esteem coming from increased emphasis on peer popularity. For other teens, depression arises f rom poor family relations which could include decreased family support and perceived rejection by parents (Quinn, 1998). Adolescent suicide is now responsible for more deaths in children age 15 to19 than cancer (Oster ; Montgomery, 1997). Your Own Particular Harbor EssayEffective Treatment for DepressionCognitive Therapy is an effective treatment for depression. It is based on the idea that how people think largely determines how people feel. This form of Therapy teaches people to recognize and challenge upsetting thoughts. Learning to challenge negative thoughts makes the patient feel better and helps them to think more realistically. Lusia Stopa explains that people cannot simply just decide to think positive. (Anyone who has suffered from depression knows that there are no simple magic answers!) Instead, she shows that people can begin to notice when and where negative thoughts occur, systematically decide how accurate these thoughts are, and where necessary, to change them to something more helpful to people. (Stopa, 2000) According to the behavioral aspects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy it recommends to monitor daily activities with a ?Weekly Activity Schedule?. Activity schedules are important because they h elp patients to see what therere actually doing as well as how much pleasure and sense of achievement (if any ) people get from particular activities. When they are feeling depressed, it can be very difficult to motivate themselves to get going again or to start changing behavior. The three main techniques for overcoming this are: planning ahead, identifying pleasurable activities, and breaking tasks into small manageable steps. (Quinn, 1998). Lusia Stopa says that the process of challenging negative thoughts is important to overcoming depression, but that learning the skills can take time. However, it gets easier with practice. Challenging bad thoughts and substituting them with more realistic thoughts makes people feel better about themselves and begins to break the cycle of depression. Also, these skills stay with the patients for the rest of their life and in the future help protects against the recurrence of depression. (Stopa, 2000). Psychotherapy or Cognitive therapy, is the preferred treatment of choice for depression, regardless of the depressions severity or symptoms. Multiple Meta-analyses have come to this conclusion, so that it is not a conclusion based on just one case study. (Stopa, 2000). Combined treatment of psychotherapy and medication should be the second choice, when choosing effective treatment options for depression. This is likely the most commonly used treatment for depression today and there is ab solutely nothing wrong with it. A patient should never go against professional advice given with regards to a patients treatment, unless he or she has first discussed it with their doctor. Especially with depression, it is better to play it safe, than be sorry. According to The Depression Source Book, by Brian R. Quinn, medication alone should be a persons last choice and only used as a last resort. Although people will likely gain some short-term relief of the most outward symptoms of their depression, studies have shown that medications dont work very well in the long-term. Those who choose to take psychotropic medications should be informed as to the negative and adverse side effects of those medications. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is considered the preferred clinically proven therapy for depression. (Stopa, 2000)ConclusionCognitive behavioral therapy, in most cases, is a short-term treatment that can have a long-term end result. In any case, this form of psychotherapy does hel p people think more realistically whether they are an adolescent or an elderly patient. Cognitive behavioral therapy without the use of medication is a good way to break the cycle for depression. Additionally, it is also a powerful self-help technique for dealing with depression and other negative emotions by consciously changing the way we think. To conclude this discussion, depression is a serious mental disorder that can strike anyone at any given time. However, anyone who is suffering from mood disorders can climb their way out a downward spiral of misery, with the strategies behind cognitive behavioral therapy. Psychology Essays