Therapy looking on the bright side of life
A conference on the use of cognitive therapy to deal with emotional distress was held yesterday by the University of Hong Kong.
Cognitive therapy helps patients by encouraging them to see the correlation between their way of thinking and their emotional state, said Daniel Wong Fu-keung, who HKU says is the city's first cognitive therapist.
'A person's way of thinking has significant impact on his behaviour and his bodily reactions and they in turn affect his emotions,' said Dr Wong, an associate professor of the department of social work and social administration.
He said problems such as depression and social anxiety could be treated or prevented if patients learned how to stop generating too many negative thoughts.
Hong Kong has an estimated 770,000 people suffering from emotional problems. Dr Wong said in two years that he hoped to train 16 cognitive therapists who could run small support groups for 800 to 1,000 patients.
In a workshop yesterday, a group of eight patients were asked to write down and reflect on their past experiences when unrealistic negative thoughts came up. Then they were asked to write down a few 'encouraging' sentences to remind them not to be unrealistically negative.
Dr Wong said a large proportion of participants who received cognitive therapy in the past 10 months in Hong Kong said they came up with less negative thoughts. In a survey on 50 participants who have suffered from emotional problems for at least three years, almost all reported having more positive emotions while about one-fourth said they were having fewer negative thoughts.
One patient, Germany Lau Fung-mei said being in the cognitive group helped her to have a more positive outlook.
Suffering from depression for two years, the 24-year-old single mother said she used to hide at home and even contemplated suicide when she felt hopeless about handling the stress from her divorce and the increasing pressure from work.
Ms Lau said after joining the group in March last year she felt her condition improved 'significantly' after she learned how to see a problem from 'a third person's perspective', which freed her from embracing extreme thoughts.
