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Treating mood disorders

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Base on infomation below, What are the major differences between behavior therapy and cognitive therapy?

Mood disorder can be treated with either medication, or therapy. Medication is also a treatment for this disorder, but in some severe cases hospitalization is needed. Cognitive therapy has been especially effective for treating depression. Aaron Beck (1991) believes that negative, self-defeating thoughts underlie depression. According to Beck, depressed persons see themselves, the world, and the future in negative terms. According to Beck, this occurs because of several major distortions in thinking. The first is selective perception: If five good things happen throughout the day and three bad things, the depressed person will focus only on the bad. Overgeneralization is a second thinking error underlying depression. Cognitive therapists make a step by step effort to correct negative thoughts that lead to depression or similar problems. At first, clients are taught to recognize and keep track of their own thoughts. The client and therapist then look for ideas and beliefs that cause depression, anger or avoidance.

Behavior therapies are also introduced to clients with depression. Behavior therapy involves an explicit, testable conceptual framework. In other words, behavior therapy techniques can be described with sufficient precision and can be measured objectively. Similar to cognitive therapy, behavior therapy increasingly emphasizes the importance of other family members in treatment, especially in the maintenance of therapeutic improvement. A change in overt behaviors is the idea behind behavior therapy such that clients will either decrease negative self-defeating behaviors or increase positive behaviors. Medications are also used in treatment of depression through collaboration with a psychiatrist.

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Taking both names of the therapies literally behavior means how we act where as cognitive is how we think. Behavior therapy concentrates on our actions and overt ...

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