Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Read Online Free PDF

patients treated with cognitive therapy improved more rapidly than those successfully treated with drugs. Within the first week or two, there was a pronounced reduction in suicidal thoughts among the cognitive therapy group. The effectiveness of cognitive therapy should be encouragingfor individuals who prefer not to rely on drugs to raise their spirits, but prefer to develop an understanding of what is troubling them and do something to cope with it.
    How about those patients who had not recovered by the end of twelve weeks? Like any form of treatment, this one is not a panacea. Clinical experience has shown that all individuals do not respond as rapidly, but most can nevertheless improve if they persist for a longer period of time. Sometimes this is hard work! One particularly encouraging development for individuals with refractory severe depressions is a recent study by Drs. Ivy Blackburn and her associates at the Medical Research Council at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. * These investigators have shown that the combination of antidepressant drugs with cognitive therapy can be more effective than either modality above. In my experience the most crucial predictor of recovery is a persistent willingness to exert some effort to help yourself. Given this attitude, you will succeed.
    Just how much improvement can you hope for? The average cognitively treated patient experienced a substantial elimination of symptoms by the end of treatment. Many reported they felt the happiest they had ever felt in their lives. They emphasized that the mood-training brought about a sense of self-esteem and confidence. No matter how miserable, depressed, and pessimistic you now feel, I am convinced that you can experience beneficial effects if you are willing to apply the methods described in this book with persistence and consistency.
    How long do the effects last? The findings from follow-up studies during the year after completion of treatment are quite interesting. While many individuals from both groups had occasional mood swings at various times during theyear, both groups continued on the whole to maintain the gains they had demonstrated by the end of twelve weeks of active treatment.
    Which group actually fared better during the follow-up period? The psychological tests, as well as the patients’ own reports, confirmed that the cognitive therapy group continued to feel substantially better, and these differences were statistically significant. The relapse rate over the course of the year in the cognitive therapy group was less than half that observed in me drug patients. These were sizable differences that favored the patients treated with the new approach.
    Does this mean that I can guarantee you will never again have the blues after using cognitive methods to eliminate your current depression? Obviously not. That would be like saying that once you have achieved good physical condition through daily jogging, you will never again be short of breath. Part of being human means getting upset from time to time, so I can guarantee you will not achieve a state of never-ending bliss! This means you will have to reapply the techniques that help you if you want to continue to master your moods. There’s a difference between feeling better—which can occur spontaneously—and getting better—which results from systematically applying and reapplying the methods that will lift your mood whenever the need arises.
    How has this work been received by the academic community? The impact of these findings on psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental-health professionals has been substantial. It has now been twenty years since this chapter was first written. During that time, numerous well-controlled studies of the effectiveness of cognitive therapy have been published in scientific journals. These studies have compared the effectiveness of cognitive therapy with the effectiveness of antidepressant medications as well as other forms of