Self-Control Therapy

Self-control therapy for depression, developed by psychologist Lynn Rehm,

is an approach to treating depression which combines the self-regulatory

notions of behavior therapy and the cognitive focus of the cognitive behavioral

approaches. Essentially, Rehm believes that depressed people show

deficits in one or some combination of the following areas: monitoring (selectively

attending to negative events), self-evaluation (setting unrealistically

high goals), and self-reinforcement (emitting high rates of self-punishment

and low rates of self-reward). These three components are further broken

down into a total of six functional areas.

According to Rehm, the varied symptom picture in clinically depressed

patients is a function of different subsets of these deficits. Over the course of

therapy with a patient, each of the six self-control deficits is described, with

emphasis on how a particular deficit is causally related to depression, and on

what can be done to remedy the deficit. A variety of clinical strategies are

employed to teach patients self-control skills, including group discussion,

overt and covert reinforcement, behavioral assignments, self-monitoring,

and modeling.