cognitive therapies

• CBT is a mixture of cognitive therapy (a way of changing maladaptive thoughts and beliefs )  and behavioural therapy (a way of changing behaviour in response to these thoughts)
• Ellis' therapy

  • Ellis developed a form of CBT called REBT (rational emotive behavioural therapy) with the aim to get rid of irrational thoughts and replacing them with effective rational beliefs.
  • Ellis extended his ABC model to include

  1. D - disputing irrational thoughts and beliefs - involving pragmatic, empirical and logical disputing
  2. E - the effects of disputing and effective attitude to life
  3. F- new feelings and emotions produced
• • logical dispute – where the therapist questions the logic of a person’s thoughts, for example: ‘does thinking this way make sense?’
  • empirical dispute – where the therapists seeks evidence for a person’s thoughts, for example: ‘where is the evidence that your beliefs are true?’
  • Pragmatic Disputing
  • –emphasises the lack of usefulness of self defeating beliefs 
  • How is this belief likely to help me?
• • All CBT starts with an initial 

  assessment, in which the patient and therapist identify the patient’s problems. 

  • they agree on a set of 

  goals, and plan of action to achieve these goals

  • Then aim to identify the negative and irrational thoughts
• Beck's type identify and challenge negative beliefs in relation to the negative triad
• homework

  Following a session, the therapist may set their patient homework. The idea is that the patient identifies their own irrational beliefs and then proves them wrong. As a result, their beliefs begin to change. For example, someone who is anxious in social situations may be set a homework assignment to meet a friend for a drink.

  
  

  • tetsing reality - gathering evidence which contradicts their belief-testing their hypothesis/negative tesing
  • comparing evidence of behaviours/incidents with the thought expressed
• Behavioural activation:

  CBT involves encouraging clients to become more active and engage in activities e.g sports.
• • Another strength The belief that changing behaviour such as engaging in behavioural actiavtion can be a way to alleviating the symptoms of depression is supported by a study on the beneficial effects of exercise
  • Babyak et al studied 156 depressed clients and they were randomly allocated into aerobic exercise,drug treatment and both. Those in the exercise group had significantly lower relapse rates than those in the medication group. Particularly those who had continued with an exercise regime on their own. This shows that biological treatments (SSRI) may work short term but psychological treatments (behavourial activation/CBT) have overall much better benefits longer term long term
• 2 strategies

  • reality testing
  • disputing irrational thoughts
• 1. tetsing reality - testing the client's irrayional thoughts by gathering evidence of behaviorus and incidents, usually agtheredthrough homeowrk tasks

  • comparing the thought expressed with evidence to check if they match or not

  3. diary records to monitor and identify situations where negative thinking occurs so these can be targeted

  • Another strategy used in CBT is where a therapist attempts to dispute the irrational thoughts through logical, empirical and pragmatic disputing challneging teh assumotion of teh patient