Perrine Davy & Marianne Rion
Cognitive and behavioural therapies are brief therapies made by psychologists with a scientific approach. What will be offered to the patient will be based on a number of searches. The website MG-PSY is intended for general practitioners and provides information on mental health problems and their treatment. This website helps in the diagnosis and management of various pathologies. So, we want to focus on how this site explains cognitive and behavioural therapies.
Cognitive and behavioural therapies are used in psychotherapies to treat various psychiatric pathologies such as phobias, anxiety disorders or mood disorders. The specificity of this technique of management is the willingness to work on the behaviour, cognition and emotions, the CBT also implies a commitment as important of the therapist as of the patient, we can explain to the patient, for example, that we are two researchers working on the same problem. However, the content of the therapy will be adapted to each patient, their pathology and associated symptoms. CBTs are called brief therapies, but their duration is dependent on each patient and therefore can be longer or shorter.
This paper presents different interventions that can be performed in cognitive and behavioural therapies, there are two main groups. The first is cognitive interventions that include cognitive therapy. The second group is behavioural interventions that include: behavioural change, exposure techniques and organization of activities. For the rest of our review, we wanted to focus on exposure techniques, these are the most known techniques today concerning CBT as well as the most powerful techniques in our opinion.
The exposure techniques are generally used to treat anxiety disorders like phobias, because in this type of disease people have many evasions in front of the anxiogenic situations and the phobogenic object (e.g., Something that is induced or caused by fear). Thus, this therapy allows patients to gradually confront to their phobias in order to reduce their anxiety and finally eliminate it. Firstly, the therapist and the patient have to identify clearly the fears of the patient, after that, the fears are classified from the lowest to the highest. Each fear is associated with an anxiety degree, from 0: “no anxiety” to 10: “untenable situation”. The exposure is gradual; indeed, the main goal is to create habituation in the different degrees of anxiogenic situations to move to a higher level. They are different types of exposure, the exposure in imagination and the exposure in-vivo.
The first one consists to work with the patient around imagination. The therapist asks him to imagine situations from the less anxiogenic to the most anxiogenic. The second one, is the exposure of the patient to the phobogenic object in the reality. The therapist uses the classification established before and works from it gradually. For example, the therapist can expose the patient to catastrophic scenarios or physical sensations. In the case of an agoraphobic patient, the first level with 1 degree of anxiety could be “Take the bus to the first stop in off-peak hours”, and the final level estimated at 10 could be “Take the bus to the terminal in peak times”.
Finally, cognitive and behavioural therapies help to overcome debilitating symptoms and aim to reinforce appropriate behaviours. CBT are based on various techniques like the exposure techniques, that help people to identify the mechanisms that cause the difficulties, to experiment new behaviours and thus to slowly reduce the anxiety until its extinction.
Keywords: cognitive-behavioural therapy, mental health, phobia, anxiety disorder, exposure techniques, evasion, anxiogenic situations, habituation.
Words we have learned : cognitive-behavioural therapy : thérapie cognitivo-comportementale; phobogenic : phobogène; exposure techniques : technique d’exposition; debilitating : invalidant; willingness : volonté.
References:
INSERM. (2013). Thérapie comportementale et cognitive (TCC). Repéré à l’adresse: http://www.mg-psy.org/php/prise-en-charge/therapie-comportementalecognitive.php.