How Does Talk Therapy Help Reduce Depression?

In this fast-paced world of constant challenges and unhealthy lifestyles, many of us have suffered from depression at some point in life. This disorder is rather rampant across the globe, with both youth and adults lying at the depths of stress, anxiety, and depression. According to a survey in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost 8.1 percent of Americans aged 20 years and above experienced depression in any given two-week period from 2013 to 2016.

Depression is a mood syndrome that influences every individual’s life differently based on the intensity of their stress and sensitivity of their life events. Several behavioral, sexual, cognitive, physical, and emotional symptoms enable you to identify if you have this mental illness. Your family history relating to mood dysfunction, early childhood trauma, inactivity of your brain’s frontal lobe, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), drugs, hormonal imbalances, or sudden trauma are just a few causes of this illness. Depression can turn your world upside down, as it impairs your ability to live life. Your behavior revolves around social isolation or criticism influencing your work and relationships while causing some chronic health conditions. Your doctor may prescribe antipsychotic medications; however, each has its potential jeopardies.

This is when psychotherapy, or talk therapy comes into play.

Having someone who listens to you, no matter how overwhelming your situations in life are, and giving a perspective to your life is undeniably beneficial for you and your health. Talk therapy involves talking about all your negative feelings, troubling thoughts, struggles, fears, and the things that are bothering you to a specialist who can support you. Diverse kinds of mental health specialists offer talk therapy, including psychologists, social workers, counselors, and psychiatric nurses.

There are various types of individual counseling that empower you to release your bottled-up emotions, examine them, and set them in context. The duration for every therapy depends on its type and your recovery. Some individuals need a few sessions, whereas others see therapists every week for years.

COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy enables the therapists to outline a negative pattern of mood and behaviors that lead to distress to advise you ways to bring a positive change.

INTERPERSONAL THERAPY:

Interpersonal therapy focuses on your social skills and helps you make positive modifications in your personal life to fix your relationships. It offers effective therapeutic sessions for couples so they can address their concerns most adequately and obtain perpetual changes.

DIALECTIC BEHAVIOR THERAPY (DBT)

It involves individual as well as group therapy using meditation and some CBT methods. It is beneficial in identifying the negative thinking processes in your mind and replacing them with positive changes that show in your behavior.

DBT is regarded as a great way to deal with patients who have suicidal symptoms. Many others with self-destructive behaviors may also benefit as DBT teaches them skills that encourage a behavioral change and diminish unhealthy and negative behaviors.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLING

Motivational counselling involves opening up to a therapist about your complexes that hinder your performance, which then helps you cope and fulfill your intentions. It bodes perfectly well for the individuals who seem stuck in their life. Motivational group counseling helps you rediscover your strengths by breaking the vicious negative cycle by teaching social conversational skills as well as understanding and listening. People struggling to beat substance abuse, smoking, and other addictive habits can get the best out of motivational counseling.

LIFE COACHING:

This coaching empowers and motivates you to enhance your self-esteem so you can accomplish your desired goals towards success in life.

TELEPHONE COUNSELLING

Telephone counseling helps to make it comfortable for people who feel shy to meet the counselor face-to-face to communicate their concerns. Many therapists provide free 15-minute phone consultations so you can determine if you would like to visit the center.

Here are the benefits that individual counseling significantly contributes to an individual’s life without any adverse effects, unlike some of the medicines sometimes that are used to treat depression.

IDENTIFIES YOUR CONDITION:

Talk therapy enables you to analyze what are the things that bother you and the causes behind it so that you can make positive changes accordingly. It gives a profound understanding of your mental health state, identifies the factors that trigger it, paving the way to its treatment.

ACHIEVES WELLNESS GOALS

Since counseling assists in understanding the symptoms and your mental condition, this enables you to achieve the desired solutions to those problematic conditions, consequently making your mind focused, and heart light and content while separating your true personality from your moods.

IMPROVES RELATIONSHIPS

Psychotherapy helps you free yourself mentally and spiritually from inner conflicts, enabling you to mend your broken or scarred relationships. If your mind and heart are at peace, you don’t hold any grudges or internal ill will, which ultimately flourishes your relationships.

OVERCOMES FEARS AND INSECURITIES

As you talk about your phobias and insecurities to someone who is there to lend you a helping hand, you don’t feel threatened as you unfold your inner turbulences for them to resolve. This gives you the power to overcome your fears and cope with your past traumas.

ENDS DESTRUCTIVE HABITS

Talking therapy helps to terminate damaging addictions such as drinking or using drugs, as you are at peace with yourself as you heal both spiritually and emotionally.

“Talk therapy can give you the skills to help handle your depression, so for many people, it’s a very empowering experience,” says Larry Christensen, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. “This makes it effective over a long period of time.”

CONCLUSION

People nowadays opt for medicines and other drugs to deal with their depression, which leave unpleasant and lasting impressions on their health. They are not aware of individual counseling as it just doesn’t cure depression; it makes your personality bloom. Whichever option you choose, always remember that individual counseling is a two-way process, you and your therapist are partners. They listen to you, value your feelings and thoughts, help you learn how to change, encounter negativity, reinforce positivity, and equip you with emotional freedom and inner peace.

 

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