Evaluation of State of Evidence Supporting CBT in Treating Depression (Essay Sample)

Evaluation of State of Evidence Supporting CBT
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Evaluation of State of Evidence Supporting CBT
In 1976, when cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was a fledgling intervention for dysfunctional cognitions, Aaron Beck (a psychiatrist) wondered whether it would attain a level of popularity comparable to psychoanalysis and behaviour therapy, which were established at the time (Gaudiano, 2008). Today, just five decades later, the answer to Beck’s question is apparent. CBT has risen to earn a place among the most dominant psychotherapies worldwide (Gaudiano, 2008). This meteoric rise gives the impression that this intervention effectively addresses psychiatric disorders. In support of this assertion, studies conducted to assess the efficacy of the therapy in treating depression point to a significant level of effectiveness (Beck, 2005; Cuijpers et al., 2019; Freedland & Carney, 2014). However, despite such studies, questions about whether and how CBT works to treat depression abound. For that reason, this write-up attempts to address these questions by examining the evidence supporting the efficacy of CBT in the literature.
Overview of CBT
According to Gaudiano (2008), it is easy to assume that the widespread use of CBT in treating psychiatric disorders would make it easy to define. In reality, that is not the case because it is an umbrella term that describes several treatments (McMain et al., 2015). Specifically, the individual treatments that fall under the CBT umbrella include “cognitive therapy, problem-solving therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, meta-cognitive therapy, rational-emotive behaviour therapy, cognitive processing therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, cognitive-behavioural analysis system of psychotherapy, and schema-focused therapy” (Gaudiano, 2008, p. 6). Therefore, it is more accurate to refer to this family of interventions as cognitive behavioural therapies, as similar or closely related underlying principles connect them. Moreover, although the tenets of the various CBT interventions may be similar, their application in practice is sometimes dissimilar (Gaudiano, 2008). Therefore, whenever the cognitive model of a given mental disorder is targeted with an intervention meant to modify the