New Age solution: CBT for Depression

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT for depression is a new age remedy for treating depression syndromes and disorders. Also it helps in dealing with daily stress and tensions. Human emotions are complex mixture of emotions, physical sensations, cognitions (thoughts, mental images and memories) and behaviours. A mentally depressed person will often show down and depressive thinking (such as failure), feel physically depressed (like always tired), and will portray a depressed attitude and behaviour. All these factors will interact, interplay and influence each other have a profound impact over our psyche.

If somebody always thinks in a depressive manner then they will begin to feel and act in that way only. On the other hand, behaving and thinking of positive things helps in changing depressive thinking, reduces depressive attitudes and behaviours and helps overcoming depression altogether. Understanding approaches with which how one can combat depressive thinking, is advisable to distinctly divide a person’s cognitions, mental frame (mental processes) into two categories - content of thought and pattern of thoughts. Content of thought is a concept which is familiar to us all - it simply encircles what we're thinking, mental messages that we are constantly coding and decoding. Depressed people will have depressive content in their thought content and curse their fate for their bad condition.

On the other hand, CBT for depression tracks patterns of thought patterns are not that comprehensible, but they are still accessible. Our thought patterns are our approaches of thinking (or our habitual thinking) rather than the content of thinking. We are actually thinking from minute to minute subject to transformation with respect to changing circumstances. These are nothing but our approaches of viewing experience of ours, the image that we have of us and the significant others and the world around us.

Depressed people will have pattern of thinking patterns that highlight on the bad and unpleasant aspects of their past experience, and diminish or even totally neglect the good aspects. For example, a depressed person is likely to remember unpleasant or bitter, embarrassing events from their haunting past and rarely remember the good times that they had.

The content of our thoughts change rapidly with passing hours of day and depends largely on our activities. Our thought patterns are stable and can be persisted lifelong. It is our underlying patterns of thought that determines what our content of thought would be and hence the corresponding behaviours.

CBT for depression helps to improve ailment of depression by altering individual’s depressive pattern of thinking and shows them the way to develop more balanced, helpful and rational ways of thinking. This evidently leads to less depressive content of thought and therefore less outburst of depression.

CBT for depression helps in identifying one’s depressive thoughts. This is done by noting what one individual is thinking about (your content of thought ) when one feels mentally vulnerable and particularly distressed. These thoughts are known as Negative Automatic Thought, or NAT. CBT for depression monitors and records one’s NATs over a period of weeks and then treatment is done accordingly.