Treating Depression through Positive Thinking
When people talk about someone else’s depression, they tend to take it lightly and can never realize the misery of the person who suffers from this severe mental health problem. When a person has a bruise or a cut in his body part, it shows up and others can understand the pain the person may be going through. But it is hard to understand why people behave the way they do when they are suffering from depression. It is not just feeling sad or a bit down all the time. Slowly it becomes a way of life and severely cripples a person’s life and he draws inward avoiding social contacts. There are people who have been battling with depression all their life with no medication curing their symptoms. It is in this context that cognitive behaviour therapy needs to be mentioned. It has emerged as a way to help people suffering from depression by altering their way of thinking and changing the way they react to stimuli in their environment.
Depression affects a person on both physical as well as emotional fronts. While physical symptoms need to be tackled using anti depressants, the psychological well being of the patient is equally important and it needs to be tackled through psychotherapy. Treating depression through cognitive behaviour therapy or any other form of psychotherapy is a long process and involves the therapist or counsellor to get to the root cause of the patient’s problems. Once the underlying cause of depression has been identified, the therapist has to devise ways to alleviate the impact of the cause or reason on the psyche of the individual.
CBT normally has two elements known as the cognitive element and behavioural element attached to it. While the cognitive element helps patients identify the thought structure that leads to unknown fears and anxieties they carry with them, behavioural elements help patients by suggesting ways and means of changing their thought pattern and also changing the way they react to different situations in life that cause or trigger depression.
CBT believes that it is not the situation and events in life that cause depression in a person but the way they think about them which is how they view and perceive them. People who suffer from depression have a negative attitude towards life and in fact to every event that takes place in their lives. They tend to think of negative consequences about an action even before undertaking it and this is what makes them fall into the trap.
CBT attempts to help patients of depression to start thinking in a more rational manner and also how to feel the happiness about small things in life which fail to arouse any emotions in depression patients. CBT also attempts to gradually reduce the negative attitude that such people have about themselves. Cognitive behaviour therapy tries to open the shut windows inside the minds of such people to let them have broad and balanced views about life and things in general.
For more information please call The CBT Partnership in Hertford on 01992 552022 or visit their feature on The Best Of Hertford to see how their therapy can help with these problems.
