CBT therapy anyone?

Uthur

Anyone ever done this? How much does it cost and how long does it
normally take?

I'm hoping to do some of this for my panic attacks. My psychiatrist gave
me the contact details of a specialist but I'm just getting an
answering machine :-(

Is there a website or anything that can help you to get in touch with
people that offer this type of therapy?

Thanks!

JoeKelly

Yea a good friend of mine is doing it at the moment. He is being treated for OCD and he says it helps! Iv gone to a few lectures on the subject and it appears to be an effective treatment. If you consult your GP he should be able to refer you to a cognative behavioural therapist.
It a pretty long term treatment also to the best of my knowledge not sure how much it costs but your health insurance might cover it!

bug

what is it then?

nesf

CBT = Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for anyone who doesn't know.

Brief description from www.cognitivebehaviourtherapy.com

Cognitive behavior therapy* combines two very effective kinds of psychotherapy — cognitive therapy and behavior therapy.

Behavior therapy helps you weaken the connections between troublesome situations and your habitual reactions to them. Reactions such as fear, depression or rage, and self-defeating or self-damaging behavior. It also teaches you how to calm your mind and body, so you can feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions.

Cognitive therapy teaches you how certain thinking patterns are causing your symptoms — by giving you a distorted picture of what's going on in your life, and making you feel anxious, depressed or angry for no good reason, or provoking you into ill-chosen actions.

When combined into CBT, behavior therapy and cognitive therapy provide you with very powerful tools for stopping your symptoms and getting your life on a more satisfying track.

As a therapy, it is very hit or miss. I tried it and it did nothing for me. However, I have friends who have made great progress with it. It is a very individual thing in my opinion. My advice is to go to a few sessions and see if it works for you. Therapy has the great advantage of being side effect free (well, kinda) and you can work through a few different therapies before finding the one that suits you without worrying about the effect on your system. Drugs aren't nice that way, it takes months on a drug to test it's effectiveness.


Oh btw as an aside, that site is very anti-medication. It's points are valid, and it does raise some valid concerns, but like a lot of information on mental illness, it picks specific examples of drugs with poor effacity rather than talk about the problem in a general fashion. It's concerns about the over-prescription of antidepressants are very valid though and I concur with them 100%. Far too many people are put on these drugs.

Blinda

The best people to recommend a good therapist are mental health professionals.
In simple terms the therapy is in guideing you through your phobic situation IN VERY SMALL STEPS - through the bits in between the start and the END of your thoughts - (the end IMAGINARY IRRITIONAL AWFULL OUTCOME) = 'thinking' = cognitive.

Without knowing the actual situation its difficult to give accurate example but sessions might go something like the following in guideing you to confront the phobia.
What are you thinking re situation /phobia?
On a scale 1-100 how bad is the feeling?
On a scale 1-100 what is the worst thing that could happen?

Try the first small step - (from the beginning of the thought re the situation - stay focused at this distance and score 1-100.
What is the worst thing that could happen at this point? - score it.
What control have you over the situation at this point? - score it.
Go on to the next small step - score etc......etc.................................

Chucky

Just to add more weight to the effectiveness of the therapy...I am doing it now also and it works quite well. You have to WANT to do it though - It is hard work.

ando

A bit OT, but has there been any study done in the past to see what percentage of the Irish population suffer from panic disorder/anxiety or depression? I'm curious to see how many of the public has suffered from these conditions in some point in their lives. It’s still very much a hush hush topic in my experience, which imo is not healthy

nesf

ando wrote:

A bit OT, but has there been any study done in the past to see what percentage of the Irish population suffer from panic disorder/anxiety or depression? I'm curious to see how many of the public has suffered from these conditions in some point in their lives. It’s still very much a hush hush topic in my experience, which imo is not healthy

AWARE say that over 300,000 people in Ireland suffer from depression. But this figure is only those that they know of, they estimate that the figure is much higher.

The problem is, what regular people call depression can be very different to actual clinical depression. Also while Generalised Anxiety Disorder is quite common in people with depression, they are seperate issues to a large degree.

Stats from the US for instance:

Frequency:

* In the US: Lifetime incidence of MDD is 20% in women and 12% in men. Prevalence is as high as 10% in patients observed in a medical setting.

Source Depression Article on eMedicine
MDD = Major Depressive Disorder.

But the above incidence rate refers to all depressive disorders. These are very varied. Many of which are not recognised as depressive disorders in our society. Dysthemia, a chronic but mild depression, is a very nasty disorder that can be very stubborn to treatment, but someone with it, might be considered as just someone who isn't a happy person and who is a bit lazy. Then on the flip side you get people who aren't happy and who are lazy claiming they have dysthemia, because they don't want to accept the reality of their situation. People like to blame anything but themself for their faults.

For instance,

People with "severe depression", ie depressions of either or both abnormal intensity or abnormal lenght are much rarer. For instance the average depressive episode for a person with depression lasts anywhere between 2 weeks and 3 months. A person with severe depression could have an episode that lasts 4 years or even longer. This is not common. The human mind doesn't seem to appreciate being in a depressed state for this lenght of time. There are also some very nasty results from being in a depression this long, for instance psychotic symptoms like hallucinations, delusions and paranoia are very common in people in a depressive episode for over 2 years. Abnormal intensity applys to people who need hospitilisation for most of a depressive episode. Again this is not common, while a lot of depressives will spend some time in hospital at some point, people with abnormally intense depressions need to be protected from themselves for prolonged periods of time.

Also and most importantly, in this country, a large percentage of people with depression end up as alcoholics or other substance abusers. A lot of people who actually have depression, are viewed as simple alcoholics or drug addicts. Now don't get me wrong, not all substance abusers are people with depression, addictive substances are addictive to anyone, not just depressives. (Actually sustained alcohol abuse can be the cause of depression in some people as an interesting aside. Although it's arguable which comes first, was the person already highly susceptable to depression before they started abusing alcohol or is their depression soley because of their drinking? It's hard to tell really.)

Basically in this country we have an attitude of "explaining away" mental illness by blaming other factors in a person's life. Depression and other mental illnesses suffer from stigmatisation because mental illness tends to go hand in hand with other things that society frowns upon and tries to ignore.

Anxiety disorders

Stats, again from the US:

* In the US: Two major studies in the United States have estimated the prevalence rates for a variety of anxiety disorders. These 2 studies are the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) study and the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) study. Using these and other studies, the estimated lifetime prevalence rates for individual anxiety disorders are panic disorder (2.3-2.7%), generalized anxiety disorder (4.1-6.6%), OCD (2.3-2.6%), PTSD (1-9.3%), and social phobia (2.6-13.3%).

* Internationally: The prevalence of specific anxiety disorders appears to vary between countries and cultures. A cross-national study of the prevalence of panic disorder found lifetime prevalence rates ranging from 0.4% in Taiwan to 2.9% in Italy. A cross-cultural study of the prevalence of OCD found lifetime prevalence rates ranging from 0.7% in Taiwan to 2.5% in Puerto Rico.

Source is the anxiety section of the same site I got the depression stats from. I'm lazy, sue me.

Again these are lifetime prevalence figures rather than figures relating to the actual percentage of people suffering from the disorder at any one time.

Anxiety figures are actually much better than depression figures. Anxiety tends to be easier to spot and more patients will seek help when they have it. Depression, and it makes sense, is more likely to be just put up with.

Will cut this short here, need to be somewhere else in real life. Hope the above stuff answers at least part of your questions