Behavior Therapy Plus Medication May Help Teens With Depression And Substance Use Disorders

The antidepressant fluoxetine combined with cognitive behavioral therapy appears as effective for treating depression among teens who also have substance use disorders as among those without substance abuse problems, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

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Cognitive behavior therapy combined with antidepressants are used for depression treatment and other disorders like anxiety disorders, fear and anger. This psychotherapy involves recognizing negative thinking and replacing it with positive thoughts and beliefs.

Cognitive behavior therapy helps to change your habitual modes of thinking about yourself, your future and change the negative styles of thinking and behavior often seen with depression. Cognitive behavior therapy combines two effective therapies: cognitive therapy and behavior therapy.

Behavior therapy: Behavior therapy helps in weakening the connections between troublesome circumstances and habitual reactions to them. Habitual reactions can be depression, fear, rage, self-defeating or self-damaging behavior.

This therapy for depression also helps in calming down your mind and body so that you can feel better, think clearly and take better decisions.

Cognitive therapy: Cognitive therapy helps in recognizing how certain thinking patterns are causing symptoms of depression. The therapy gives a picture of what is going on in your life, what is making you feel anxious, or what is provoking you into depressed actions.

Cognitive behavior therapy for depression:

The first step in this therapy is to recognize cognitive distortions. Factors that are considered when you are in depression to give the therapy are identification of skill deficits, self evaluation, pessimistic thinking, automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, irrational ideas and evaluation of life experiences.

The therapist provides techniques to give you a greater degree of control over negative thinking by correcting thinking errors or cognitive distortions. Negative thinking in depression can be due to negative view of world, negative view of self and negative view of future.

The therapist helps you to understand how negative thoughts influence mood and feelings, and help you to latch on to a more accurate and logical way of thinking.

Along with therapy, there are antidepressant medications available that are producing rapid results in many sufferers, with improvement occurring in several days. Cognitive behavior therapy is used in conjunction with antidepressant medications for relieving depression [depression treatment].