Treatments and Therapies

What’s CBT? (stands for Cognitive behavior therapy)

June 22, 2015 By Kay Walker

Many therapists today suggest CBT as a therapy for patients suffering from mental health disorders. Here’s a brief overview of how it works.

What’s CBT? (stands for Cognitive behavior therapy)

If you’ve ever listened to Dr. Laura Schlessinger on Sirius radio you’ll hear her recommend CBT to many people. It’s one of the most effective and popular treatments for learning new behaviors.

CBT, as it’s most commonly known, stands for Cognitive Behavior Therapy. And the nature of the method is as it’s named. It involves reprogramming thought and behavior patterns you’ve learned overtime, that have helped prevent you from dealing with fears, or pain, and allow you to ensure your survival.

CBT acknowledges that what you think about a external situation influences your emotional experience. And, what you think and believe is also related to what you’ve learned.

For example, a person that almost drowned as kid may see a body of water and think “I need to stay far away from the water”. They will feel fear and the action they will take will be to avoid the water. Whereas, a person who spent summers at the beach, took swimming lessons and never had an accident, may see the same body of water and think, “wow, I’d love to hop in there right now.” They will feel happy when they see water and will take an action like going for a swim.

When your behavior does not serve what you would like to do – for example, the adult that had the swim accident is embarrassed of their inability to swim on a vacation with friends – it becomes a distressing problem. The good news, is this thought – emotion – behavior pattern can be disrupted and changed through CBT.

CBT as a diagram looks like this:

The diagram above presents a triangle to show how thoughts, behaviors and emotion are connected and continue to reinforce one another overtime.

CBT acknowledges that individuals learn automatic behaviors that become difficult to control through rational thought. It appears as if they act spontaneously to situations, without any reasoning. That’s because the past has conditioned them to react automatically.

Why CBT is effective and how it’s different from other therapies

CBT targets the problem in behavior, which makes it a problem-focused type of treatment. It teaches you new actions that stop you from taking unwanted actions you have taught yourself to take. It replaces them with healthy behaviors that lead to more favorable outcomes. Therefore, it is more “action-oriented” than earlier therapies and leads to fast results.

Earlier therapy techniques (which are still in practice today) focus on understanding the past to learn why you have a tendency to behave a certain way. This introspection can be helpful, though it does not address present issues. It looks directly at the problems the individual is suffering from and treats them. The goal is not to diagnose, but to fix.

Six phases of CBT treatment:

Assessment
Reconceptualization;
Skills training;
Application of skills
Maintenance;
Post-treatment and follow-up.

A typical CBT program consists of in-person sessions with a therapist. A minimum of six to 10 sessions with one to three weeks in between. There are often homework assignments to do that help you learn and use various skills.

How ECT works for depression

June 22, 2015 By Kay Walker

If you’ve tried antidepressants, you are making healthy lifestyle choices, you are involved in therapy, and none of it works, your physician may consider you a good candidate for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

How ECT works for depression:

During an ECT treatment you’ll receive a stream of electric currents to the head that go into the brain and induce a short seizure. The result is changes in your brain chemistry that may reignite lagging or malfunctioning communication processes.

An ECT treatment is like rebooting a computer that’s not working properly. When you restart the system the system reboots (restarts) and in many cases the problem goes away when you turn the computer back on.

Does ECT hurt?

It sounds seems like crude treatment – zapping your brain with electrical currents – but it is highly effective for some people. And the newer treatments use better equipment and technology so it’s much safer than it used to be. Early treatments involved extremely high doses of electricity that were given without pain medications or anesthetics. This resulted in major issues such as fractured bones and neurological problems like memory loss.

Today, patients are given multiple treatments instead of one giant one. They receive the treatment under general anesthesia, so it is painless. The patient is asleep for most of the treatment. When they wake up they may experience some side effects – like brief memory loss and confusions. Most side effects are short term and will go away within one or two weeks.

In general, ECT treatments are administered two to three times per week for three to four weeks. Most patients receive somewhere in the range of six to 12 treatments. The number of treatments depends on the severity of your symptoms.

Factors that increase the likelihood an individual will get depression

June 11, 2015 By Kay Walker

Depression risk factors

The following is a list of risk factors that will heighten an individual’s chance of getting depression and considering suicide as anoption. A person could have one or more of the risk factors to be considered vulnerable, though, it’s often a combination.

Factors that raise the likelihood of depression and suicide

1) Dealing with difficult life circumstances:

Having a history of trauma or abuse and not having dealt with it using therapeutic tools
Major financial loss
Job loss
Loss of valuable relationship
The death of a close loved one

2) Actions that can worsen mood and lead to major depression:

Abusing substances like alcohol and drugs
Having already tried to commit suicide makes you more prone to considering it as an option faster than other people
Not eating enough daily calories or carbohydrates (which are important for brain energy)
Eating too many processed foods and sugars
Not getting enough physical exercise
Spending too much time alone (up to three days without seeing or speaking to anyone)
Doing something you deeply believes goes against your morality – what you believe is right or wrong. If you’ve done something you consider bad it could cause you a great deal of emotional pain. It could be a severe as committing a crime, cheating on a partner or even having sex if you are raised in a religion

3) Environments that can increase the risk of depression and/or suicide:

Family history of mental health issues or suicide attempts
Living in household of trauma or abuse or being in an environment (ie. school or work) where you feel trauma regularly
Easy to access lethal means like guns or drugs or dangerous objects
Living in an area where local suicides have occurred
Lack of social support and sense of isolationLack of health care, especially mental health and substance abuse treatment
Not having financial stability or living in poverty
Cultural and religious beliefs, such as the belief that suicide is a noble resolution of a personal dilemma
Exposure to others who have died by suicide (in real life or via the media and Internet)

4) Having an underlying medical disorder or mental illness that’s affecting mood:

Mental disorders, particularly mood disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and certain personality disorders
Major physical illnesses
Illness that has you deal with daily physical pain

5) Having a weak emotional IQ:

Never having learned how to properly deal with your emotions. It’s a learned skill that isn’t taught in schools or taught to parents.
Believing there is something wrong with asking for help, so you try to do it on your own and don’t get very far.
If you’ve been put down and taught that you aren’t good enough you may have very low self-esteem.