Conginitive Behavioral Therapy For PTSD | Report

Running head: COGINITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY FOR PTSD
COGINITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY FOR PTSD
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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COGINITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY FOR PTSD
The paper focuses on what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is and how this treatment
acts upon different mental diseases especially on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper
is going to talk about many of the case-studies on PTSD and studying each of them crucially
to show the effectiveness on this mental illness. Each of the cases are picked up and analyzed
on the basis of the treatment and its impact on the patient. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a
kind of psychotherapy which enables one to overcome illnesses like anxiety, depression,
trauma, and phobia or ant sort of mental disorder (Wiles et al., 2013). Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder is a mental disorder that is generated in a person either after experiencing or
countersigning a particular horrifying incident. Therefore, the objective of the paper is to
analyze the condition of multiple patients inflicted by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and
how the change occurred in their behavioral pattern because of this therapy.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can be defined as a disease which surfaces in a patient
due to encountering any terrible incident which recurrently comes back to the patient in the
forms of nightmares and anxiety attack. It has been surveyed and examined that it can turn
out to be very dangerous because the patient tends to absorb into a strange world where he
misses out some basic practices of human beings such as self-care, indulging into
entertainment. The patient in some cases becomes very pessimistic and tends to lose faith
from himself. He is always engrossed in negativity and seems to have lost all the positivity
and eagerness from his life. Now, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a verbal or conversational
treatment through which a patient is provided with mental strength to overpower the trauma
one is going through. The repeated session between the patient and the therapist can show the
desirable result of the patient coming back to normalcy gradually. The therapeutic session is a
not a long-term procedure. It locates the negative attitude in a patient and addresses the issue
to get done away with it in an ongoing process. It brings about the changes in the deleterious

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habits of a patient and tries to decentralize positivity in terms of emotional aspect to be very
specific.
There are primarily four types of this therapy including Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, Multimodal Therapy and Dialectical Therapy (Trimble, 2014).
REBT is such a procedure where negative objects are identified and the patient is taught to
deal with it positivity while a constant change in the behavioral Pattern is witnessed. In
Cognitive Therapy patient is to identify and rectify inappropriate or misleading thinking
arrangements and emotional inclinations. The seven types of modalities like imaginative
capabilities, perception, behavior, impression or feelings, medical factors, affect and
interpersonal behaviors are addressed and taken into consideration in the other category
named Multimodal Therapy. Lastly the Dialectical Therapy deals with the incorporation of
techniques like sensitive parameter and mindfulness.
There are some particular changes visible in a patient thoroughly if one is suffering
from PTSD for instance the patient tends to avoid the places where the accident might have
happened, deliberately ignoring the encounter with the people associated with the incident,
generating pessimistic thoughts, envisioning the incidents time and again, having horrible
nightmares, feeling emotionally drained out most of the time, going through numbness,
having issues related to memory, being the victim of losing sound sleep, concentration, being
overpowered by excruciating guilt mostly all the time and being surrounded by very low self-
esteem (Tanev et al., 2014). The most dangerous outcome of this disorder is acquiring the
suicidal tendency.
According to multiple surveys by different psychoanalytical studies, there are various
instances of visible behavioral changes found in patients after the implementation of CBT on
them. For instance, a war veteran from Afghanistan named Jill has witnesses her fellow

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comrade Mike to get blown away by an explosive device. This incident has left such a dark
impression in her mind that the nightmares did not spare her at all. She saw the recurrent
visions of her broken truck in the convoy while the people from other truck mocking her for
her inefficiency of failing to save Mike. She was guilt-ridden after the encounter of the
accident. Jill went through ten sessions of CBT where she faced questions regarding the
protocol of fixing up the truck, whether she saw anything suspicious before the explosion or
not. She was also asked what could make her feel better which made her promptly utter less
guilt was equivalent to her wellbeing. The therapist made her understand that following the
protocol even at an adverse situation makes her a responsible veteran which immediately
made her less guilty. Thus, the consecutive procedure helped her to get away with her guilt
and got back her normalcy.
Again in a different case, fourteen patients have been taken into the method of
intensive CBT where they have been provided with three to four sessions in consecutive
weeks of 18 hours to be precise. The intensive CBT had resulted in such a way that maximum
number of patients, who were collected from different continual referral, had been successful
in overcoming the trauma with the help of the treatment. Intensive CBT had more effective
result on patients than that of the patients of weekly CBT. As a result most of the patients
came out of depression. Hence from the above study it is worth mentioning that intensive
CBT is more reliable than weekly treatment in terms of PTSD.
As it is easily identified in Jill’s case it is visible that to overcome her guilt of
inadequacy in saving her friend she needed a ten times session. She had been assured by her
therapist that her comfort will be taken care of. She would not be forced to answer anything
and she would be able to choose to answer the questions according to her choice(Monson &
Shnaider 2014). A series of questions were prepared for her. She had to analyze the questions
and answer accordingly. The evident result of her treatment was that she had finally

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triumphed over her guilt effectively. The questions helped the therapist to comprehend her
insight and scrutinize her trauma meticulously. Each time the different session progressed
with the advancement of intensity of questions. The different segmentation of question in all
the sessions suggested her to come out of the recurrent visit of the nightmares. The intensive
CBT affected her in a way that she overcame the trouble of guilt and helped her assess herself
to delve into more self-care. The therapy in different classified session guided her to get back
to life once again and stop thinking herself to be responsible for Mike’s death. It is shown
that in a war victim suffering from PTSD needs minimum of ten sessions to be done with the
trauma and guilt in an effective way. War has its severe traumatic consequences and Jill,
being the prey of it had to go through CBT and it helped her to a certain level that she herself
admits that she feels a way better than before(Jokić-Begić & Begić 2003). In the second case
where the treatment brought about a distinctive result in those fourteen students who were
suffering from different levels of PTSD shows that intensive CBT is more powerful than the
weekly cure (Ehlers et al., 2010). The 18 hours session helped them to reduce their
depression in an effective way.
It has been specifically studied that it is necessary that a CBT plan has to have
different segmentation of several questions. It has to go through separate stages segregated on
the basis of intensity of the associated topic. In most of the cases, keeping the severity of the
disorder in mind the dissections of the sessions have to be planned. The method of CBT for a
war victim has to be inevitably different from that of a patient suffering from a road accident
trauma. One needs a session of 15 times whereas the other needs a ten times session. The
style of questions will be entirely different to bring in the alteration in behavioral pattern of
the patients accordingly.
At the end in conclusion it can be said that CBT has proved to be a desirable
procedure of curing the ailment of PTSD. The case studies show that different level of

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disorder needs different kind of attention to be given to solve the problems. There are some
disadvantages of CBT including locating only current problems while not addressing the
other issues, dealing with the problems of initial stage. Managing time in between works is
another issue that the patients face. The case studies can be the example of how the CBT
work on different patients of PTSD in diverse ways and how the outcomes are multiple in
different stages of disorders in terms of different patients. CBT is such a treatment that is
allocated through government aid towards the patients. A natural disaster can be the reason of
this sort of disorder and also a troublesome accident can be the cause of this kind of illness
but in every single aspect the procedure and the approach towards the patients should be
different.

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REFERENCES
Ehlers, A., Clark, D. M., Hackmann, A., Grey, N., Liness, S., Wild, J., ... & McManus, F.
(2010). Intensive cognitive therapy for PTSD: A feasibility study. Behavioural and
Cognitive Psychotherapy, 38(4), 383-398.
Monson, C. M. & Shnaider, P. (2014). Treating PTSD with cognitive-behavioral therapies:
Interventions that work. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Trimble, M. R. (2013). Post-traumatic stress disorder: History of a concept. In Trauma and
its wake (pp. 31-39). Routledge.
Tanev, K. S., Pentel, K. Z., Kredlow, M. A., & Charney, M. E. (2014). PTSD and TBI co-
morbidity: scope, clinical presentation and treatment options. Brain injury, 28(3),
261-270.
Wiles, N., Thomas, L., Abel, A., Ridgway, N., Turner, N., Campbell, J., ... & Kuyken, W.
(2013). Cognitive behavioural therapy as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy for primary
care based patients with treatment resistant depression: results of the CoBalT
randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 381(9864), 375-384.
Jokić-Begić, N., & Begić, D. (2003). Quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) in combat
veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nordic Journal of
Psychiatry, 57(5), 351-355.