Pros & Cons of CBT Therapy
Research has shown that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be as effective as medication in dealing with Anxiety & Depression issues.
There is always a threat that bad feelings you relate to your issue will return, but with your CBT skills it ought to be easier for you to control them. This is why it is necessary to continue practising your CBT skills even after you are feeling better and your sessions have actually finished.
However, CBT may not be effective or ideal for everyone.
Some benefits and downsides of the method are listed below.
Benefits of CBT
Can be as reliable as medication in dealing with some mental health conditions and might be handy in cases where medication alone has not worked.
- Can be finished in a relatively short amount of time compared to other talking therapies.
- Concentrate on re-training your ideas and altering your behaviours, in order to make changes to how you feel.
- The highly structured nature of CBT implies it can be provided in different formats, consisting of in groups, self-help books and computer programs.
- Abilities you find out in CBT are useful, useful and practical strategies that can be included into everyday life to help you cope better with future tensions and difficulties, even after the treatment has completed.
Disadvantages of CBT
- To gain from CBT, you need to dedicate yourself to the process. A therapist can help and advise you, but can not make your issues go away without your co-operation.
- Participating in regular CBT sessions and carrying out any extra work in between sessions can use up a lot of your time.
- Due to the structured nature of CBT, it may not be suitable for individuals with more complex mental health requirements or finding out difficulties.
- As CBT can involve confronting your stress and anxieties and emotions, you might experience initial durations where you are more mentally uneasy or nervous.
- Some critics argue that because CBT only focuses and addresses present problems on specific concerns, it does not attend to the possible underlying reasons for psychological health conditions, such as an unhappy youth.
- CBT focuses on the person’s capacity to alter themselves (their sensations, thoughts and behaviours), and does not attend to broader issues in systems or families that frequently have a considerable impact on a person’s health and health and wellbeing.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a psycho-social intervention that aims to improve mental health. CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping strategies that target solving current problems. Originally, it was designed to treat depression, but its uses have been expanded to include treatment of a number of mental health conditions, including anxiety. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behavior psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.
CBT is based on the combination of the basic principles from behavioral and cognitive psychology. It is different from historical approaches to psychotherapy, such as the psychoanalytic approach where the therapist looks for the unconscious meaning behind the behaviors and then formulates a diagnosis. Instead, CBT is a “problem-focused” and “action-oriented” form of therapy, meaning it is used to treat specific problems related to a diagnosed mental disorder. The therapist’s role is to assist the client in finding and practicing effective strategies to address the identified goals and decrease symptoms of the disorder. CBT is based on the belief that thought distortions and maladaptive behaviors play a role in the development and maintenance of psychological disorders, and that symptoms and associated distress can be reduced by teaching new information-processing skills and coping mechanisms.
When compared to psychoactive medications, review studies have found CBT alone to be as effective for treating less severe forms of depression,anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), tics,substance abuse, eating disorders and borderline personality disorder. Some research suggests that CBT is most effective when combined with medication for treating mental disorders such as major depressive disorder. In addition, CBT is recommended as the first line of treatment for the majority of psychological disorders in children and adolescents, including aggression and conduct disorder. Researchers have found that other bona fide therapeutic interventions were equally effective for treating certain conditions in adults. Along with interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), CBT is recommended in treatment guidelines as a psychosocial treatment of choice, and CBT and IPT are the only psychosocial interventions that psychiatry residents in the United States are mandated to be trained in.
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