CBT for Depression

Depression is common, complex, and deeply individual. It can be one of the most challenging issues therapists encounter. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy remains one of the most widely researched and recommended treatments for depression, with decades of studies and international guidelines supporting its effectiveness.

This training gives you clear, practical CBT tools you can use in your sessions. You will learn how to understand and address the thoughts, behaviors, and emotional patterns that contribute to depression, and how to help clients reconnect with activity, meaning, and hope.

Whether you are supporting clients through hopelessness, low motivation, self-criticism, anger, or co-occurring substance use, this course helps you use CBT in a structured, compassionate, and clinically effective way.

What You Will Learn

This course builds on foundational CBT training and gives you focused, practical tools for treating depression with confidence. You will learn how to:

• Use structured CBT approaches to understand and treat depressive patterns

• Increase engagement, mastery, and pleasure through behavioral activation and other behavioral strategies

• Help clients work with thoughts and beliefs that maintain depression

• Integrate mindfulness, compassion, and emotion-focused strategies when helpful

• Build clients’ skills in problem-solving, social skills, assertiveness, and sleep to support mood

• Address depressive experiences such as low self-worth, anger, and motivational deficits

• Move through stuck points and support meaningful, sustainable change