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Considered a gold-standard treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an extremely popular method of dealing with a cornucopia of mental health conditions because of its fundamentals of how it works and its efficacy. However, can it be a substitute for taking medication? This article will explore what CBT can do for you and help you decide if it’s the only course of action you should take.
How CBT Works
Many of the most common mental health disorders, like depression, anxiety, and OCD, are closely tied to how we think and behave, particularly in response to the negative feelings and emotions that we experience.
For example, it’s common to get trapped in an unhealthy mindset by perpetuating specific beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.
In order to get out of this and start healing, one must change the way we think and how we respond to our thoughts that cause us to feel distressed.
CBT aims to do this by helping individuals develop more realistic thoughts and break these problem areas down into more manageable steps that change the way you think about issues as a whole.
By taking a rational approach, you will become less stressed out, and over time, neural pathways will become reformed, and you will rewire your brain because negative thoughts and behavior patterns are not reinforcing it. This will help your mood in both the short and long term.
What About Medication?
CBT is very practical, and it works, and there is plenty of scientific research available to support it, but how does it stack up with prescription medication that’s commonly prescribed for mental health disorders.
In certain conditions, like ones that are related to negative thought patterns such as anxiety, depression, and OCD, cognitive behavioral therapy can be more effective than medication because it tackles the root reasons why these conditions exist and persist in the first place.
By understanding this and knowing how to challenge them, you have a strategy that you can use for a lifetime.
However, this doesn’t mean that medication can’t be helpful, and many people will see benefits in taking both approaches at the same time. For example, prescription drugs can make managing symptoms and going through the therapy process easier.
In certain cases, though, such as severe disorders like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, medication cannot be replaced because there is a strong biological cause for why these conditions occur (i.e., abnormally elevated dopamine levels).
For these disorders, therapy cannot be a substitute for antipsychotic medication and mood stabilizers like lithium, but that doesn’t imply that people with these lifelong disorders can’t find relief from therapy, and to reiterate once more, using them in conjunction with each other is encouraged because it can be difficult to cope with the feelings and emotions.
Additional Information Regarding CBT
If you’re interested in reading more about cognitive behavioral therapy, head over to BetterHelp to find out details about it, such as an in-depth overview of its principles, treatment expectations, and what types of issues CBT is most effective at addressing.
Since CBT is regarded as one of the most effective psychotherapy methods of all time, finding a professional who understands it is easy. BetterHelp can get you connected to a qualified counselor or therapist online who is trained to help people like you with cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as more specific forms of it, like exposure therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT).
In addition to working with a therapist, there is some degree of independence involved in CBT, and you will be assigned “homework” that’s designed to help you practice the skills you learn during your sessions. This will help you create lasting change for yourself and ingrain strategies that you can use for the rest of your life.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when it comes to the issue between medication and therapy, the general consensus is when used together, people see the best outcomes rather than picking one or the other, so why not use both? However, this is entirely dependent on the issues that you’re currently dealing with, and for a lot of people, medication cannot be replaced. That being said, cognitive behavioral therapy can offer many benefits that prescriptions cannot, so it should be considered in any treatment regimen.
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