Therapy for Depression

There are many forms of therapy that can help people with depression. Some are effective in the short term--commonly around 16 weeks or 4 months. "Talk Therapy" helps depressed people gain insight into their problems by talking with a therapist, and through this, help to solve those problems. Often the therapist will give the patient short assignments to do between sessions, such as monitoring their negative thoughts. "Behavioral Therapy" teaches people with depression how to get more happiness and rewards from life through modifying their actions, and unlearning some of their behavioral patterns that may be contributing to their depression.

There are two short term therapies that have been shown to be the most helpful with depression:

1. Interpersonal Therapy - This type of therapy focuses on the patient's relationships and how their personal relationships may affect or cause their depression, and works on ways to fix these problems.
2. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy - This type of therapy deals with negative thought patterns, and often involves keeping a log of your negative thoughts and then learning how to counter them with evidence against them. At first you will spend much time on each thought--thinking of evidence that supports the thought, as well as evidence against the thought. Using this evidence, you then change your original negative thought into a more rational/balanced thought. The task may be daunting at first, but the goal is, with enough practice, that this process becomes automatic in your head-- you will do all these steps in a couple of seconds and without even having to think about it. This helps your depression as you will have less negative thoughts--and even when you do have negative thoughts, you will be able to refute them and not let them cause depression as they may have before you learned these techniques.

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