Cognitive behavioral therapy helps improve people's moods and behavior by changing their way thinking; also, how they interpret events and talk to themselves. This form of psychotherapy helps guide people into thinking more realistically and teaches them coping strategies to deal with their depression. Cognitive therapy is in most cases a short-term treatment that can have long-term results. I will discuss depression in adolescence and how it effects personal adjustments, which may often continue into adulthood. I will also discuss depression in the elderly. There are different approaches to treating depression, the main approach that will be discussed is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a way to break the cycle for depression.

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive behavior therapy helps people break the connections between difficult situations and their habitual reactions to them. This can be reactions such as fear, rage or depression, and self-defeating or self-damaging behavior. It also teaches people how to calm their mind and body, so they can feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions. Cognitive therapy also teaches peopl

Cognitive Therapy is an effective treatment for depression. It is based on the idea that how people think largely determines how people feel. This form of Therapy teaches people to recognize and challenge upsetting thoughts. Learning to challenge negative thoughts makes the patient feel better and helps them to think more realistically.

According to Dr. Judith S. Beck and Dr. Aaron Beck, her daughter, "Patients have continual unpleasant thoughts and that each thought deepens the depression." However, these thoughts are not based on facts and result in feelings of sadness this is far beyond what the situation guarantees, it has to do with hypothetical situations. "Depressed persons make such mistakes over and over," Quinn has written. "In fact, they may misinterpret friendly overtures as rejections. They tend to see the negative, rather than the positive side of things. Plus they do not check to determine whether they may have made a mistake in interpreting events."(Quinn, 1998) Depressed thinking often takes the form of negative thoughts about oneself, the present, and the future. The mood in depression is almost always experienced as sad.

Furthermore, Clarke stated that it is not uncommon for adolescents to be preoccupied with issues of mortality and to contemplate the effect their death would have on close family and friends. Once it has been determined that the adolescent has the disease of depression, what can be done about it? Clarke has suggested two main avenues to treatment: "psychotherapy and medication." The majority of cases of adolescent depression is mild and can be dealt with through several psychotherapy sessions of intense listening, advice and encouragement. (Clarke, 1999) On the other hand, for the more severe cases of depression, especially those with constant symptoms, medication may be necessary and without pharmaceutical treatment, depressive conditions could escalate and be fatal.

Lusia Stopa says that the process of challenging negative thoughts is important to overcoming depression, but that learning the skills can take time. However, it gets easier with practice. Challenging bad thoughts and substituting them with more realistic thoughts makes people feel better about themselves and begins to break the cycle of depression. Also, these skills stay with the patients for the rest of their life and in the future help protects against the recurrence of depression. (Stopa, 2000).

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