Understanding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Addiction: Its Use in Tapering Off Benzodiazepines

Benzodiazepines Dependence: Addiction to Legally Prescribed Substances

“…CBT is an empirically validated psychotherapy, its collaborative, active, and structured approach based on principles of learning theory combining verbal interventions and behavior modification techniques to help patients identify errors in thinking and [20], to allow a change in cognitive processes and maladaptive behavior in order to reduce psychological distress [20,39]. At the level of anxiety intervention, CBT proposes a set of integrated approaches, namely psycho-education and training coping strategies to deal with and deal with anxiety, relaxation, cognitive restructuring and exposure therapy to anxiety stimuli among other techniques [40].…”

“…As careful as dose reduction is concerned, benzodiazepinedependent patients may develop numerous symptoms. CBT has been identified as a psychotherapy to manage and prevent BZD reduction or withdrawal, promoting successful outcomes [20,24], helping to minimize or deal with withdrawal symptoms [24], as well as helping to prevent relapse [20].…”

“…Despite the evidence of the psychotherapeutic intervention in anxiety, namely Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) [19][20][21][22], anxious patients are more likely to choose pharmacotherapy than psychotherapy [23][24][25]. However, the use of pharmacotherapy, specifically the use of BZDs requires a number of precautions [26], since they are only safe and effective for short-term treatment, and its long-term use may lead to development of tolerance and dependence [3,5,6,9,11,26,27] and to be able to present countless consequences and undesirable effects [5,9,12,18,25,[28][29][30][31].…”