Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) can help anyone who is experiencing mental health difficulties. What you think can affect how you feel and behave. This is the basis of CBT. During times of mental distress, you think differently about yourself and what happens to you. Thoughts can become extreme and unhelpful. This can worsen how you feel. You may then behave in a way that prolongs your distress. CBT practitioners help each person identify and change their extreme thinking and unhelpful behaviour. In doing this, the result is often a major improvement in how a person feels and lives.CBT treatments have received empirical support for efficient treatment of a variety of clinical and non-clinical problems, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders, and psychotic disorders. It is often brief and time-limited. Some CBT therapies are more oriented towards predominately cognitive interventions while some are more behaviourally oriented. In cognitive oriented therapies, the objective is typically to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviours that are related and accompanied to debilitating negative emotions and to identify those which are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or more importantly unhelpful. This is done in an effort to replace or transcend them with more realistic and useful ones.
CBT was primarily developed through a merging of behaviour therapy with cognitive therapy. While rooted in rather different theories, these two traditions find common ground when focusing on the "here and now" and symptom removal. Many CBT treatment programs for specific disorders have been developed and evaluated for efficacy and effectiveness; the health-care trend of evidence-based treatment, where specific treatments for specific symptom-based diagnoses are recommended, has favoured CBT over other approaches such as psychodynamic treatments. In the England, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommends CBT as the treatment of choice for a number of mental health difficulties, including post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD, bulimia nervosa and clinical depression.
