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| Cognitive Therapy |  Cognitive therapy is when a doctor discusses with you your negative thoughts and helps you to replace them with positive thoughts. This can help you stop the pattern of negative thoughts and can help you feel better.
The first time you meet with your doctor or therapist, you'll speak about any problems you've been having and how you've been feeling. You'll also discuss your aims for therapy. You and your doctor will decide how often you'll have therapy, after a few visits. You may determine to meet each week, or you may meet once a month. Your doctor will help you decide what's best for you.
You'll learn new ways to think about the situations that disturb you while you're in therapy. You'll also find out new ways to cope with your feelings. Cognitive therapy can be useful to overcome the feelings of anger, anxiety, shyness, or panic.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an empirically supported treatment that concentrates on patterns of thinking that are maladaptive and the beliefs that underlie such thinking. For instance, a person who is depressed may have the belief, "I’m worthless," and a person with a phobia may have the belief, "I am in danger." While the person in distress likely holds such beliefs with great persuasion, with a therapist’s help, the individual is inspired to view such convictions as hypotheses rather than facts and to test out such convictions by running experiments. Moreover, those in distress are inspired to monitor and log thoughts that pop into their minds (called "automatic thoughts") in order to enable them to decide what patterns of biases in thinking may exist and to develop more adaptive alternatives to their thoughts. People who seek CBT can expect their therapist to be active, problem-concentrated, and goal-directed.
Researches of CBT have shown its usefulness for a great variety of problems, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders, and psychotic disorders.
CBT has been demonstrated to be as helpful as antidepressant medication for individuals with depression and is superior in preventing relapse. Patients getting CBT for depression are inspired to schedule activities in order to maximize the amount of pleasure they experience. In addition, depressed patients educate themselves about how to restructure negative thought patterns in order to interpret their environment in a less biased way. CBT for Bipolar Disorder is employed as an adjunct to medication treatment and concentrates on psychoeducation about the disorder and understanding cues and triggers for relapse. Researches show that patients who get CBT in addition to treatment with medication have better results than patients who do not get CBT as an adjunctive treatment.
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