Rethinking How We Think About Cognitive Interventions for Depression: An Example From Research on Second-Language Acquisition

Abstract

One of the primary goals of cognitive therapy for depression is to teach an individual a new, more adaptive way of thinking about stressful life experiences. We argue that this process of supplanting a deeply engrained way of negative thinking with a more adaptive style of thinking is similar to learning a second language. The purpose of this article was to use a second-language acquisition framework to evaluate the strategies typically used in cognitive therapy for changing depressogenic cognitive patterns and to propose new strategies that may make the therapy more effective.