About 350 million people around the world suffer from depression. Therapists can use many different techniques to help, but none has more rigorous scientific evidence behind it than cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). This “inside-out” technique focuses primarily on thought patterns, training patients to recognize and reframe problematic thinking. Now, however, mental health professionals have another option: mounting evidence shows that a technique called behavioral-activation (BA) therapy is just as effective as CBT.
BA is an outside-in technique in which therapists focus on modifying actions rather than thoughts. “The idea is that what you do and how you feel are linked,” says David Richards, a health services researcher at the University of Exeter in England. If a patient values nature and family, for example, a therapist might encourage him to schedule a daily walk in the park with his grandchildren. Doing so could increase the rewards of engaging more with the outside world, which can be a struggle for depressed people, and could create an alternative to more negative pastimes such as ruminating on loss.
BA has existed for decades, and some of its elements are used in CBT, yet until now it had never been tested with the scale and rigor needed to assess its relative strength as a stand-alone approach.
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Category(s):Depression
Source material from Scientific American
