CBT vs Behavioral Therapy: Differences and Similarities Explained

It’s helpful in reducing positive symptoms of schizophrenia, especially treatment-resistant symptoms such as delusions. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is effective in treating some mental health problems, but it may not be successful or suitable for everyone. The purpose of CBT is to help identify thoughts and behaviors that may be negatively affecting your life. Instead, CBT works to restructure unhelpful thoughts and behaviors into positive and healthier patterns.

Understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): More Than Just Positive Thinking

These mental gremlins, often called cognitive distortions, can wreak havoc on our emotional well-being. They’re like those annoying pop-up ads on websites – intrusive, persistent, and often based on faulty information. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a type of CBT that emphasizes the acceptance of all feelings and behaviors while at the same time attempting to change some of those behaviors.

Related techniques

For example, someone with a substance use disorder might practice new coping skills and rehearse ways to avoid or deal with social situations that could potentially trigger a relapse. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the most common and best studied forms of psychotherapy. It is a combination of two therapeutic approaches, known as cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy. In general, there’s little risk in getting cognitive behavioral therapy. This is because CBT can cause you to explore painful feelings, emotions and experiences. Numerous standardized scales exist for measuring the most important features of almost every diagnostic category.

Your first therapy session

• Children and adults with various mental health conditions might benefit from CBT.
• CBT for depression was at least as effective as medication or other forms of psychotherapy, and more effective than treatment as usual.

Here are just a few examples of techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy. In Germany, a psychotherapy practice can bill the statutory health insurer directly for two to four trial sessions at first – and up to six trial sessions for children, teenagers and people with learning difficulties. This allows the psychotherapist cbt interventions for substance abuse and client to get to know each other, find out what the problems are and whether therapy would be worthwhile. After the trial sessions, you and the therapist have to prepare an application explaining why therapy is needed. You have to submit this application to your health insurance company before therapy can begin.

How long does CBT take for patients to see results?

One way that researchers address these questions is by conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where different treatments are carefully and systematically compared to one another. The same process is used in medicine to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs. Over the past few decades thousands of such studies have examined CBT and researchers can now combine the results of these RCTs into ‘meta-analyses’ to show, in even more reliable ways, which treatments work. The graph below shows the result of a meta-analysis of CBT that was published in 2015 [8]. The results are from 48 studies that compared CBT with ‘treatment as usual’ for nearly 7000 people with anxiety, depression, or mixed anxiety & depression. The results show a clear effect in favour of CBT – more people get better when they receive CBT compared with their usual treatment.

CBT vs Behavioral Therapy: Key Differences and Similarities