When you’re diagnosed with depression, it may feel like you’ll never go out under the dark shadow. However, with proper therapy, medication, and healthy lifestyle changes, even the most severe depression can be treatable. This page covers the four common treatments or therapies used to treat diagnosed patients.
Therapy, along with discounted medication with the help of BuzzRx, can significantly help a person with depression. But before proceeding with this article, you must understand that the common therapies mentioned below should only be administered by a licensed professional, namely, a psychologist or a therapist. You should avoid doing these to yourself or other people if you aren’t licensed to practice the following therapies.
This page serves as an introductory page on the treatments or therapies that diagnosed depression patients are likely to receive.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT for short, is the most notable therapy for numerous disorders, including depression and different disorders. CBT is a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapy. Cognitive therapy dwells on your emotions and moods. In comparison, behavioral therapy targets your behaviors and actions.
A therapist who practices this combined approach will work with you at an agreed location (maybe their office at the clinic), offering you proper guidance and direction. You and the professional would work to identify the negative thoughts you have and the patterns of it. Your behavioral responses to stressful and challenging situations are also something that a therapist would identify in this approach.
When the psychologist and the patient realize the negative thought patterns, the professional now helps the patient learn how to modify them. It involves learning how to develop a more constructive and developed way to respond to stressors. Ideally, the new modification to your responses would help you better recover and cope with challenging environments, situations, mental health conditions, or unwanted behaviors. But first, you need to consider the MTHFR test and understand what is MTHFR.
Interpersonal Therapy (IPT)
Depressive disorders aren’t always caused by a relationship or by an event. However, depression affects your relationship and causes interpersonal connection problems. As a result of these problems, it may contribute to the severity of your disorder.
IPT or Interpersonal therapy aims to help patients communicate effectively and better with their friends, family, colleagues, and other people. This approach aims to address the problems that contribute to their depression.
The treatment begins with an interview. Here, the therapist will ask you questions about your problems and the difficulties you experience. After this, they would create a treatment course consistent with your goals.
IPT focuses on detecting the immediate difficulties experienced in interacting with other people and how they contribute to your symptoms. It’s similar to modern psychotherapies. However, it doesn’t focus on the unconscious origins of current behavior and feelings.
Problem-Solving Therapy (PST)
When a psychologist suspects that a patient’s depressive disorder stems from everyday life problems, they may recommend and apply PST or problem-solving therapy. This approach focuses on helping the patient develop strategies to resolve their problems. Its goal is to relieve depressive symptoms by dealing with the problems in day-to-day life.
The problem-solving therapy would occur in 8 to 16 sessions, and it would either be done individually or in group sessions. It’s a step-by-step process, and they will help you with the following:
- Identify problems
- Think of numerous realistic solutions to solve said problems.
- Select the most promising solution.
- Develop an action plan and implement it.
- Evaluate how effective the solution was and the action plan.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
Depressive disorders’ symptoms include persistent irregularities in the mood. As a result, it significantly affects daily functioning and creates unwanted consequences and behaviors. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is an effective approach for treating depression, emotion regulation, and other related issues. The therapy teaches tangible skills to patients to tolerate and regulate mood. It also teaches patients to modify ineffective behaviors to reduce accidents.
Not all treatment and self-realization can occur in session; often, a session would only occur for an hour. It’s why clinicians who use DBT use phone coaching; it’s a hands-on crisis intervention tool designed to help patients resolve their crises more effectively and faster.
The four components of DBT are:
- Mindfulness – is learning to be genuinely present and focus on current situations.
- Distress Tolerance – it’s learning how to avoid behavior that makes a situation worse. It’s learning how to tolerate mood irregularities, painful emotions, and events that make you think life is unbearable.
- Emotion Regulation – learning how to change, accept, and manage different emotions you feel so that when you experience an overwhelming emotion, it won’t control you.
- Interpersonal Effectiveness – learning how to communicate with other people in respectful ways while ensuring that you maintain and set healthy boundaries and uphold positive self-respect.
Final Thoughts
Now that you’ve read the information above, you should know that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all type of treatment option. You and your psychologist may go from another treatment option to another if they don’t see any improvements. If this happens to you, just be sure to trust the process. Healing from depression is no easy feat. It would take numerous sessions and a willing mind to start the healing process.
