REBT for Depression

Depression is the primary cause of disability in the United States, and it is becoming more prevalent every year. In 2017, major depressive disorder affected over 11 million adults, or 4.5% of the country’s adult population. Research shows that a combination of medication and psychotherapy is the best treatment. Fortunately, that leaves a wide range of options for treating the mood disorder.

What Is Depression?

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common medical condition that affects the way you think, feel, and behave. Also known as major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it contributes to a wide range of physical and emotional issues and makes it hard to function at home or work. Treatments fall into three broad categories: medications, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Clinical depression differs from the sadness or grief that comes from situations like losing a loved one or getting a divorce. The grief process is a natural part of healing, and everybody grieves differently. Although depression and grief cause similar feelings, they are not alike.

Major depression involves a low mood or lack of pleasure that lasts for two weeks or longer. Grief comes in waves, interspersed with good memories and normal self-esteem. Depression causes feelings of worthlessness and negative thinking. Difficult situations can trigger major depression, and depression can exist with and complicate grieving.

Anyone can get depressed, but certain factors affect the odds. These factors include brain chemistry, genetics, personality, and environment. Fortunately, depression is highly treatable. Proper diagnosis and depression treatment are important, but lifestyle changes, such as exercising, getting enough sleep, cutting out alcohol, and eating a balanced diet help too.

How Talk Therapy Helps

Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, involves a relationship between an individual and a psychotherapist, or counselor, but there are many kinds of talk therapy. What they all have in common is the ability to uncover hidden feelings that trigger mood disorders and learn healthy ways to deal with them.

Psychology Today lists dozens of types of talk therapy, ranging from animal-assisted to trauma-focused, and a 2014 article in Forbes magazine lists 11 ways psychotherapy helps:

Provides long-lasting effects
Benefits physical health
Unveils repressed emotions
Reduces passive aggressive behavior
Introduces a fresh perspective
Teaches how to deal with conflict
Makes issues easier to see
Gives a chance to share feelings
Rewires the brain
Reduces need for medication
Improves parenting and relationship skills

Talking with friends or going to support groups can help too, but one-on-one therapy has the unique advantage of allowing feedback, ensuring confidentiality and being nonjudgmental. Group therapy gives individuals a chance to share and learn from others who are going through similar circumstances.

What is Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy?

Rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) is a short-term talk therapy that helps you recognize negative thoughts and feelings, examine them to see how rational they are, and replace them with healthier, more positive beliefs. After you identify and understand unhealthy thoughts and actions, you can change and replace them for the better.

REBT for depression operates on the principle that it’s not what happens to us that causes our problems. Instead, it’s the way we think about it that leads to difficulties. REBT helps with all kinds of emotions, including anger, anxiety, guilt and depression.

How REBT Helps Treat Depression

Rational emotive behavioral therapy operates on three basic principles:

Recognizing problem-solving skills
Addressing negative thought patterns
Learning better ways to cope

How REBT Helps Treat Depression

Depression is an illness characterized by negative thinking and feelings of low self-esteem. When you learn skills to help you think more clearly and act more constructively, you make better decisions in the present, but you also carry the skills into the future. That helps to keep the mood disorder from coming back and is especially important if you have recurring bouts of depression.

REBT also helps with other disorders, such as anxiety, anger, frustration, and panic, that accompany depressive thinking. Recent research with brain scans shows that REBT helps to prevent relapse and normalizes brainwave patterns. Besides shifting your brain from a depressed state to normal, REBT and other cognitive training techniques help you feel better too.

How TMS Works in Conjunction with REBT for Depression

Harvard Health blog says transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) shows “hope for stubborn depression.” A noninvasive way to stimulate the brain, TMS uses strong magnetic fields to affect activity in areas of the brain that regulate mood.

TMS has fewer side effects than medication and needs no anesthesia because the device operates outside the body. Headache is the most common side effect, and seizures, though rare, may occur. Talk to your doctor if you have a history of head injury, epilepsy, or other neurological conditions.

About 50 to 60% of individuals with depression who failed to respond to medications benefited from TMS, and depressive symptoms went away in 33%. Average results last a little over 12 months, and follow-up treatments are available. Most people say symptoms of depression disappear in around six months.

REBT depression treatment teaches you to examine your thoughts and replace them with a healthier view of the world, but that’s hard to do when you’re locked into negative thinking and feelings of worthlessness. Transcranial magnetic stimulation improves your mood and self-esteem. When you feel better about yourself and have a more positive look at life, it’s easier to put the things you learned in REBT for depression into practice, making REBT and TMS a powerful pair.

More About REBT

From 2019 to 2020, 1 in 3 college students in the United States showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression during the school year. One theory suggests that teaching undergraduates to recognize and dispute irrational thoughts is an effective form of treatment for depression. Some rehab centers integrate rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) with other kinds of depression treatments.

Psychologist Albert Ellis first developed rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s. The philosophy teaches that it’s not the events happening in a person’s life that cause distress. Instead, it’s thoughts and beliefs about those events that lead to negative emotions, an idea first expressed by the Greek philosopher Epictetus around 2,000 years ago.

According to REBT, most people want to be productive, get along with others, earn a living, and enjoy life. It’s what they do when things aren’t going well that determines their happiness or depression. Dr. Ellis created a formula to show how this works. You have an experience, and you have a belief about the event. Then, you have an emotional reaction to that belief.

If somebody cuts you off in traffic, you might react by thinking the driver did it intentionally. As a result, you can get angry. Instead, what if someone cuts you off in traffic, but something makes you believe it’s because the driver is rushing to the hospital to visit a dying parent? In that instance, you might feel compassion and wonder how you could help. The difference is not the event; it’s your reaction to the event.

The Three Basic Musts

Ellis says upset feelings stem from upsetting beliefs or the “three basic musts.” Each “must” includes a demand of oneself, others, or the world:

I must have the approval of others to think well of myself.
Others must treat me with respect, fairness, and kindness, and I must do it the way I want.
If they don’t do it exactly as I wish, they deserve to be judged and punished.

The first “must” often results in shame, guilt, anxiety, and depression. The second “must” leads to passive-aggressive behavior, rage, and aggression. The third “must” causes procrastination and self-pity. Healthy boundaries are far more flexible and less likely to cause irrational reactions leading to conditions like depression or anxiety.

REBT begins by disputing irrational beliefs and replacing them with healthier ones, giving new insight into thoughts and behavior. Therapists help clients develop unconditional acceptance of themselves, individuals, and society as a whole.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Other Treatments

Caregivers use a combination of medical and psychotherapeutic practices to help depressed college students along the way. One of the most innovative therapies is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique that uses electrical pulses to stimulate brain regions that affect mood. Used as a complement to traditional treatments or a promising alternative when other treatments have failed, TMS is non-invasive, effective, and available to outpatients. TMS, when used with REBT for depression, alters brain chemistry and encourages positive thinking.