Discuss some of the applications of cognitive behavioural therapy to the treatment of depression.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Depression

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is founded on the principle that an individual 's way of thinking affects their behavior , indicating that cognition is directly related to behavior . This therapy involves the guiding of an individual to learn to handle the different ways by which they distort reality with their cognitive processes , to learn to cope with their own cognitive distortions : overgeneralization catastrophising , black and white thinking , labeling , mind reading fortune telling , and the like (Sullivan et al , 2003 ) Thus an individual is guided to recognized occurrence of

negative automatic thoughts and to learn to modify these thoughts into more positive and more constructive ones . Thus Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to reframe an individual 's cognition in the hopes of reforming problem areas identified in his or her behavior

Cognitive Behavior Therapy has been utilized for many different psychological diss and problems . Researchers have been so intrigued by the potential of cognition as a key to an individual 's behavior that many different techniques have been paired with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in efforts to find potent complementary techniques that will aid in the therapy 's aim of helping an individual renew their cognition mechanisms . This would provide those on the field , with more tools with which they could address their clients ' complaints . One such example is the successful results yielded by the study on the augmentation of metaphor , Gestalt principles and guided imager with the original processes of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Abbatiello , 2006

Although Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is often used on many different psychological problems such as addictions , pain diss , eating diss , anger issues , anxiety diss , sexual dysfunction and family problems , the therapy 's most popular an d most widely acknowledged application is on depression . Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been found to be a strong and effective technique that can be used to aid an individual experiencing depression . Its strength has been found in the cognitive aspects that serve as the foundations of depression . It has also been found in the results of studies utilizing the therapy in different ways on a population of individuals with depression

Mechanism of Cognition on Depression

The cognitive theory on depression is heavily founded on an information-processing model . Depression induces an individual to think negatively about certain processes through a prolonged and emphasized manner . The way by which depressive individuals cognitively process information , in the taking in of information as well as in its assessment , is varied to a certain degree from that of non-depressive individuals that it causes dysfunctional behavior . The differed way of cognitization in depressed individuals leads to extreme misery and can even lead to harmful behavior such as suicide or self-injury (Beck 2002 1989 Davison Neale , 2001

According to Beck (2002 , a depressed individual has negative schemas that cause biases in their way of thinking which in turn fuels the negative schema . Thus depression is a vicious cycle fueled by distorted cognitive processes . This is what Beck calls the cognitive triad

Another theory on depression states the...