What is cognitive remediation therapy and who is it for?
What is cognitive remediation therapy and who is it for?
Cognitive remediation therapy is a psychosocial therapeutic intervention that aims to accompany patients with cognitive impairment.
It is a specific therapeutic technique aimed at restoring, strengthening, and compensating for impaired cognitive abilities. This accompaniment contributes, indirectly, to improving the autonomy of patients and their socio-professional functioning.
Many psychiatric illnesses and disorders lead to cognitive difficulties in patients, including memory, attention, concentration, organization, and planning abilities in the face of complex tasks.
Without such management of cognitive difficulties, patients may even have a negative impact on the prognosis of the mental illness they suffer from. In the case of schizophrenia or depression, for example, attention and memory problems, although not among the major symptoms of the disease, can have a serious impact on people’s social and professional life.
Cognitive remediation therapies, therefore, allow the recovery of these attention and memory capacities, and will promote social and professional reintegration. Their objective is to offer people affected by this type of disorder treatment that will enable them to recover their cognitive abilities, or at least to learn how to compensate for them with the ultimate goal of recovering a satisfactory quality of life.
Cognitive disorders that are associated with schizophrenia or other psychotic pathologies generally have little access to the usual treatments (medication and psychotherapy). Yet they are a source of handicaps that seriously harm the subject’s well-being.
Cognitive disorders include a heterogeneous set of deficits that can affect memory, attention, executive functions and social cognition. These information-processing disorders severely impair the relational and professional skills of people with chronic psychotic pathologies.
Cognitive remediation must, therefore, be employed as soon as possible after an appropriate neuropsychological assessment, in order to effectively reduce the effects of these cognitive disorders on the daily life of the patient with a mental illness such as schizophrenia.