Cognitive behavioral therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cognitive behavioral therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

CBT has six phases:

1. Assessment or psychological assessment;
   
2. Reconceptualization;
   
3. Skills acquisition;
   
4. Skills consolidation and application training;
   
5. Generalization and maintenance;
   
6. Post-treatment assessment follow-up.

The reconceptualization phase makes up much of the "cognitive" portion of CBT.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown as an effective treatment for clinical depression. The American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines (April 2000) indicated that, among psychotherapeutic approaches, cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy had the best-documented efficacy for treatment of major depressive disorder. One etiological theory of depression is Aaron T. Beck's cognitive theory of depression. His theory states that depressed people think the way they do because their thinking is biased towards negative interpretations. According to this theory, depressed people acquire a negative schema of the world in childhood and adolescence as an effect of stressful life events, and the negative schema is activated later in life when the person encounters similar situations.

Beck also described a negative cognitive triad, made up of the negative schemata and cognitive biases of the person, theorizing that depressed individuals make negative evaluations of themselves, the world, and the future. Depressed people, according to this theory, have views such as, "I never do a good job", "It is impossible to have a good day", and "things will never get better." A negative schema helps give rise to the cognitive bias, and the cognitive bias helps fuel the negative schema. This is the negative triad. Beck further proposed that depressed people often have the following cognitive biases: arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, over-generalization, magnification, and minimization. These cognitive biases are quick to make negative, generalized, and personal inferences of the self, thus fueling the negative schema.

In long-term psychoses, CBT is used to complement medication and is adapted to meet individual needs. Interventions particularly related to these conditions include exploring reality testing, changing delusions and hallucinations, examining factors which precipitate relapse, and managing relapses. Several meta-analyses have shown CBT to be effective in schizophrenia, and the American Psychiatric Association includes CBT in its schizophrenia guideline as an evidence-based treatment. There is also some (limited) evidence of effectiveness for CBT in bipolar disorder and severe depression.

A 2010 meta-analysis found that no trial employing both blinding and psychological placebo has shown CBT to be effective in either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and that the effect size of CBT was small in major depressive disorder. They also found a lack of evidence to conclude that CBT was effective in preventing relapses in bipolar disorder. Evidence that severe depression is mitigated by CBT is also lacking, with anti-depressant medications still viewed as significantly more effective than CBT, although success with CBT for depression was observed beginning in the 1990s.

According to Cox, Abramson, Devine, and Hollon (2012), cognitive behavioral therapy can also be used to reduce prejudice towards others. This other-directed prejudice can cause depression in the "others," or in the self when a person becomes part of a group he or she previously had prejudice towards (i.e. deprejudice). "Devine and colleagues (2012) developed a successful Prejudice Perpetrator intervention with many conceptual parallels to CBT. Like CBT, their intervention taught Sources to be aware of their automative thoughts and to intentionally deploy a variety of cognitive techniques against automatic stereotyping."

My God!

You've got to PUNCH into this anger

management class...?