Behavioral therapists try to help people change behavior, theorizing that feelings come from actions. Melinda A. Stanley, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, uses a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapies, called cognitive behavioral therapy. When we work with patients to help them change the way they feel, we focus on thoughts and behaviors creating those feelings. People do have losses, and fearful things happen in their lives. We try to help patients be more objective, and to treat their thoughts as hypotheses and decide if they're really true.
Cognitive therapy requires hard work.
You learn to recognize habitual thinking errors . Recording thoughts in a diary can help. Effectiveness Cognitive therapies are the most heavily researched forms of psychotherapy. In 1989, researcher Keith Dobson analyzed 28 small studies and found cognitive therapy to be more effective in the treatment of depression than behavioral therapy, other types of psychotherapy or drug treatment, or no treatment. Stanley is directing a clinical trial at UT-Houston to test cognitive behavioral therapy on older people with generalized anxiety disorder.