As Advanced Practice Nurses (APNs) interact with patients who have health problems, many of them find that their patients also suffer from mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and other illnesses. So how can APNs best address the mental health needs of their patients? Two articles published this fall in Medscape’s Advanced Practice Nursing ejournal discuss how Cognitive Therapy (CT), also referred to as Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), is an effective, time-limited, clinically tested treatment that is ideal for nursing settings. (To view these articles, you have to be registered with Medscape – registration is free.)
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Advanced Practice Nursing: An Overview, Dr. Sharon Morgillo Freeman, a psychologist and certified Cognitive Therapist, discusses how CBT meets APNs’ need for effective, empirically based treatment — it’s a great overview for any APN interested in CBT, and includes a case example of a depressed patient treated with CBT. In Nurses Integrate Cognitive Therapy Treatment Into Primary Care: Description and Clinical Application of a Pilot Program, Dr. Judith Beck and Dr. Christine Reilly describe a pilot program that trained 12 APNs in CT, and monitored their success in implementing CT with low-income, underserved patients. This pilot program, conducted by the Beck Institute and the National Nursing Centers Consortium (NNCC), showed that APNs were able to integrate CT techniques in their primary care practices, with better patient results. We expect that in the future, we’ll see more and more integration of CT in nurse settings…