Concept

Cognitive behavioral therapy

Overview

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that combines basic principles from cognitive psychology and behaviorism. It aims to reduce symptoms of various mental health conditions by challenging and adjusting convictions and assumptions, while helping patients learn better-adapted behavior by trying and training new behaviours. While CBT has philosophical precursors in Stoicism, it developed in three waves in the 20th century.

The first wave consisted of the development of behaviorism in the 1920s and behavioral therapy in the 1950s and 1960s. The second wave focused on the importance of cognitions in the therapeutic process, resulting in the development of cognitive therapy by psychoanalyst Aaron Beck in the 1950s and the establishment of classical CBT, when cognitive and behavioral approaches were combined. The third wave took place in the 1980s and 1990s, when principles originating from Buddhism, especially mindfulness and acceptance, significantly contributed to the development of various new forms of CBT. Over time, cognitive behavior therapy became an umbrella term for all cognitive-based psychotherapies.

CBT is a "problem-focused" and "action-oriented" form of therapy. The therapist's role is to assist the client in finding and practicing effective cognitive and behavioral strategies to address identified obstacles and alleviate symptoms of the disorder. CBT is based on the belief that thought distortions and maladaptive behaviors play a role in the development and maintenance of many psychological disorders. CBT focuses on challenging and changing these cognitive distortions (thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and their associated behaviors to improve emotional regulation and help the individual develop coping strategies to address problems.

CBT includes a number of cognitive and behavioral psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies. These therapies include, but are not limited to, rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), cognitive therapy, metacognitive therapy, metacognitive training, reality therapy/choice theory, cognitive processing therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and multimodal therapy. New forms of CBT specifically influenced by mindfulness approaches include dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and compassion-focused therapy.

Though originally designed to treat depression, CBT is often prescribed as an evidence-informed treatment for many mental health and medical conditions. These include obsessive–compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, substance use disorders, marital problems, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and eating disorders. Along with interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), CBT is recommended in treatment guidelines as a psychosocial treatment of choice. It is recommended by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the British National Health Service. CBT is also recommended as the first line of treatment for the majority of psychological disorders in children and adolescents, including aggression and conduct disorder.

Criticism of the therapy has focused on its lack of double-blind tested research, relatively high drop-out rates, and tendency to target symptoms rather than the underlying condition.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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It may be remarked that the general laws of association prevail among these more intricate states of mind, in the same manner as among the simpler ones. A desire, an emotion, an idea of the higher order of abstraction, even our judgments and volitions, when they have become habitual, are called up by association, according to precisely the same laws as our simple ideas.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Cognitive behavioral therapy is; the author is tied to Cognitive behavioral therapy in the knowledge graph.
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But though it destroyed the actual belief in the objective reality of these abstractions, that belief has left behind it vicious tendencies of the human mind, which are still far enough from being extinguished, and which we shall presently have occasion to characterize.
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
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But this classification could be made only after practice. In the beginning we did not know that paranoia and dementia praecox are, in their fully developed phases, inaccessible, and we were justified in trying out our method on all kinds of conditions. Besides, the greatest number of failures in those first years were not due to the fault of the physician or because of unsuitable choice of subjects, but rather to…
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Close in meaning to Cognitive behavioral therapy; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Behaviorism.

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