Cognitive Remediation Therapy

This type of therapy is for individuals who are experiencing difficulties in their thinking. For example, people with epilepsy often complain of memory, concentration, and word finding difficulties. These common difficulties with thinking can be related to the epilepsy itself, the medication side effects, and/or to mood difficulties that the person is experiencing. In cognitive remediation therapy, the patient learns new strategies to help these weaknesses in thinking. Oftentimes, the person's areas of cognitive strength are used to help their areas of weakness. For example, if a person is known to have a good visual memory but has difficulty remembering verbal information (e.g., the person can remember faces or locations, but not names or conversations), cognitive remediation therapy would help to teach that person how to better use visual memory even in remembering verbal information (e.g., learning how to associate a person's name with a visual characteristic -- Bill wears blue a lot).