deal with stress. Therapy can also give people the awareness to identify issues that contribute to their depression and the space to set life goals. Therapy usually happens 1:1 in person, but it can also happen in support groups and even online communities. With any treatment, therapy is most effective when people find the most suitable style of therapy and the right therapist for them.
Psychotherapy is an expansive practice and, as mentioned above, there are several types of therapy for depression. Psychotherapy is often called "talk therapy" because it involves an individual and a psychotherapist sitting in a room talking but, as a treatment, it is more nuanced than that. Psychotherapists have training in a variety of techniques and often specialize in treatments for various mental illness and personal issues.
How does therapy help in the treatment of depression? Psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for depression because it can help a patient delve into underlying triggers for depression and learn new coping skills. Many common therapeutic modalities have evidence supporting their benefit in treating depression. Several studies suggest, however, that the combination of an antidepressant and psychotherapy is the best approach, because of the biopsychosocial origins of most mood disorders.
There are many different types of therapy that can be effective in treating depression. The kind that is right for you can depend on a variety of factors including the severity of your symptoms, your own personal preferences, and therapy goals.
Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts can affect our emotions. For example, if we choose to look at experiences more positively, we will be more likely to feel good as opposed to if we only focus on the negative. This is a helpful approach because, naturally, negative thoughts can contribute to and exacerbate depression. A constant loop of negative thoughts is difficult to break. Cognitive therapy helps people learn to identify common patterns of negative thinking and techniques to turn those negative thought patterns into more positive ones. Cognitive therapy is usually short-term and goal-focused, with an expectation to do "homework" practice outside of therapy.
Where cognitive therapy is focused on the negative thoughts that contribute to depression, behavior therapy is centered on actually changing behaviors that impact emotions by helping patients engage in activities that will enhance their feelings of well-being.
Both cognitive and behavioral therapies work well together to help combat depression and anxiety disorders so much that the two are often combined in an approach called cognitive
-behavioral therapy (CBT). As the name implies, CBT focuses on addressing both the negative thought patterns as well as the behaviors that contribute to depression.
For example, a therapist may ask their patient to keep a journal to track the events that happen in the week and any negative reactions. Habitual negative responses to events (known as automatic negative reactions) are just one pattern of thinking that might be addressed over the course of CBT. Other common response patterns include all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralization.
Identifying the negative action is half of the therapy, the other task is to work with the therapist to learn new thinking patterns and ways of responding, such as positive self-talk. Like cognitive and behavioral therapy, CBT is usually brief and goal-oriented. It generally involves between five to 20 structured sessions centered around addressing specific concerns. Research suggests that CBT can be effective in the treatment of depression and that it may have lasting effects that prevent future relapse of depressive symptoms.
Another approach to clinical depression treatment is psychodynamic therapy, which is focused on the assumption that depression can occur because of unresolved, and potentially, unconscious—conflicts, often from childhood. Unlike some of the other treatment approaches for depression, psychodynamic therapy tends to be 