Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (Collection: Mental Health )

CBT is a school of psychotherapy originating in the United States and is a direct extension and growth of the earlier Behavioral Therapy (BT) school of psychotherapy. CBT, like BT before it, is extensively informed by the behavioral emphasis on stimulus-response relationships and psychological learning theory. Where the psychodynamic forms of psychotherapy sought to understand the inner mental and emotional world of patients, the behavioral school of therapy sought rather to predict, regulate and control the patients' problematic behavior. Although BT enjoyed many successes, it had become clear by the late 1970s that the exclusion of mental events from BT was a mistake - that mental events were in fact important. CBT thus developed as an extension of BT techniques to mental events such as thoughts and emotions. For example, a core CBT understanding of depressive emotions is that subliminal, often irrational thoughts precede and "cause" troubling feelings. To change the troubling feelings to more positive ones, it is necessary to help persons identify their thoughts, analyze them with respect to their rationality and challenge those that are ill-formed and exaggerated. The CBT therapist helps his or her patient by teaching the patient to view his or her thinking as a type of behavior that he or she can bring under conscious control with positive results.

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