Introduction
The principle underlying Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy model of approach to the treatment of depression capitalizes on the reality-supported interpretation of a situation and seeks to eliminate any doubts that often torment most stressed persons. This is a different way of saying that it is important that the client focuses on the real happenings in the environment and interpret these happenings accurately than relying on assumptions that most of the time they focus on negative issues.
Main body
According to o Beck, these faulty interpretations may make a stressed person interpret and respond to a simple question asked as an open criticism and instead of providing the right response, the person may get defensive. The goal of Beck’s model can therefore be said to be aimed at moving the stressed person away from these negative imaginations towards a positive way of reasoning. Going through Beck’s work many people often ask themselves this common question that “to what extent does habit and conditioning influence our cognition and how much influence can one exercise over his or her thoughts(cognition).” To be more precise it is good that people evaluate themselves based on how much they think and how this unconsciously affects their behavior. (Beck, 35).
According to Beck’s research, a more generalized approach to cognitive therapy for depression takes into account the need to move the patient through several constructed learning experiences. Patients are encouraged and advised on how to monitor and keep a record of their negative imagination and mental pictures to help in ascertaining the link between these imaginations, feelings, and behavior. They are then taught how to weigh up the soundness and usefulness of these cognitions, analyze them out practically, and alter the malfunction cognitions to reproduce a more bearable viewpoint. In the course of the therapy, patients understand how to make out, assess, and adapt underlying postulations and some of the dysfunctional beliefs that might have inclined them to depressive situations. The therapist is also supposed to teach the client adaptive coping techniques, like for example cracking big problems down into smaller ones, adapting some more manageable steps, and lastly making some cost-benefit-based decisions. The therapist also teaches the patients how to schedule their activities and initiate a self-monitoring system of pleasure and mastery which together with a rated task assignment are applied early in the therapy in an attempt to assist the patients to overcome apathy and orientate them to some more rewarding experiences. The Cognitive therapy for depression sessions is therefore said to follow a procedure that involves a brief assessment of mood and signs setting an agenda and connecting from the previous sessions with a brief review of homework. It also involves giving new homework and a two-way discussion of the homework between the therapist and the client. (Corey, 107).
It is therefore seen from the landscape set by Beck that Cognitive therapists make use of several strategies and methods in an attempt to help depressed clients in addressing their cognitive dysfunctions among them being imagery, role-playing, guided discovery, and psycho-education. With the skills and the models involved the patients require approximately eight sessions to gain a considerable level of mastery. This Beck’s approach for the treatment of depressed patients has been widely read and supported by other researchers including Dobson (1989) who have pointed it to be more superior and effective than other alternative approaches. (Beck, 270).
Work cited
Beck, Aaron, Cognitive therapy of depression, Guilford Press, 1987.
Gerald Corey, Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, Wadsworth 2001.