Many people out there suggest doing CBT while taking antidepressants, but I don’t see what problems CBT could potentially cure for me. Anxiety? Fixed by drugs (or should be fixed), Depression? Fixed by drugs, and so on. If my drugs fails at fixing problems, there’s a good chance that drug dose should be adjusted or I need other drugs that’s simple. What’s the relevance of cbt here?
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Personally I am a fan of cognitive behavioral therapy. I wouldn’t recommend cock and ball torture< but to each their own.
Might forget about your other pains for a while
It takes a village…
You can never know with 100% certainty what effect any treatment, be it drug or therapy, might have for you personally without trying it. If a lot of people say that something helped them, that doesn’t mean it will definitely help you too. Some people don’t benefit from therapy, some don’t benefit from drugs, some benefit from both, some from neither. There is unfortunately no way around trying different things and seeing what happens (unless a particular treatment concept doesn’t make sense to you from the beginning or even makes you uncomfortable - then you’re probably better off skipping it).
As somebody who has been through multiple different antidepressants, I think you are overestimating their effectiveness. While I hope they might be able to fix all problems, realistically they simply help. For me, they flatteren the bumps and reduce me spiraling but some CBT helped me learn how to recognise these and techniques to manage them. I’m not longer receiving CBT, Ive been to 20+ sessions and felt I wasn’t gaining anything anymore (not that I’ve been able to get any other therapy for 4 years now) but those techniques what I learnt from them were genuinely helpful. Helped me to realise that my drugs at the time weren’t effective as well
I won’t delve deeper but every time I tried to work out my problems (twice) with therapy I ended up on antidepressants (not saying cbt wasn’t still somewhat helpful for me in its own way), and once they kicked in it seemed to me that there was no problem to begin with. Like usually cbt comes along with some condition it’s meant to mitigate, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what I need since I have no complaints
Long standing depression and anxiety often come with habits; mental, personal, emotional, relational, hygiene. These habits can establish a negative cycle- don’t feel like doing anything because depressed > depressed because didn’t leave the couch today, etc.
CBT is about managing behaviors and won’t really go into rehashing every bad thing that’s ever happened to you. Some therapists list CBT on there About Me section, but then just do regular talk therapy, where that’s basically all you do.
If your life, health, relationships and career are all fine and you purely struggle with unpleasant feelings that are effectively medicated away without unwanted side effects, then there would be no need for CBT.
