Psychotherapy for Depression

[Source: Jingmen Evening News]

When we encounter confusion in life, a heart-to-heart chat with a friend can make us feel relieved and at ease.

Likewise, a therapeutic conversation with a psychiatrist can not only help us resolve our current confusion, but also allow us to better understand ourselves and learn to help ourselves.

For depression, psychotherapeutic talk can alter brain activity, increase the function of serotonin, a neurological substance missing from depression, and reduce activity in those brain centers that cause anxiety. That is, psychotherapy can help us modify the emotional circuits of the brain and improve our mood.

Here is a psychotherapy method that everyone can understand—cognitive therapy.

In life, if an event happens around us, it will cause us some kind of emotional response. In fact, there is an intermediate process between events and emotional responses, that is, our “evaluation of events”, or “how we view this event”. A positive evaluation of the event will bring about a good emotional response, and a negative evaluation of the event will bring about a bad emotional response.

And our “evaluation of the event” or “how we look at it” is largely influenced by our “core beliefs”. The core belief is that each of us has formed a unique attitude towards ourselves, the world and the future in our unique growth experience.

In the process of growing up from childhood, some people form degrading self-evaluations such as “I’m not cute, or I’m not good enough”, and negative views about the outside world and the future, such as “The outside world is untrustworthy. the future is difficult” and so on. When an event occurs, these negative core beliefs will “automatically” and “unthinkingly” affect our view of the event, and often negative views, which in turn generate negative emotions.

In fact, these negative core beliefs formed since childhood will be biased and distorted in the process of affecting our evaluation of events, such as partial generalization, either-or, emotional and many more.

Cognitive therapy is to discover and recognize these deviations with the help of a psychiatrist, learn to analyze their own thinking patterns, and learn to look at things comprehensively and correctly, which is what we often call “looking at problems from a different angle” . Positive and correct evaluation of events will naturally reduce negative depression.

Of course, there are many methods of psychotherapy. Cognitive therapy mainly adjusts our views, as well as adjusts our emotions and behaviors. No matter what kind of psychotherapy we receive, it is beneficial for us to improve depression. (Jingmen Contributed by the Psychological Counseling Room of No. 2 Medical East Hospital of Jingmen)

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