> Cognitive distortions are errors in reasoning resulting from negative intuitive thoughts that are not evidence-based (Burns, 1980; Covin et al., 2011).
This is not true. Cognitive Distortions are (a) not errors in themselves, and (b) usually do have lots of evidence for them.
Take, for example, the Cognitive Distortion of Fortune Telling. In a CBT session, it typically applies to a thought like "I'm going to fail this test." Well, that thought might not be erroneous — you very well might fail. And there is probably plenty of evidence for it — you might have done poorly on your homework, or you might be behind on studying, or you might not know the answers to questions on a practice test.
The issue with a Cognitive Distortion is not that it is erroneous, nor that it lacks evidence. The issue is that it makes you depressed, anxious, scared, and unable to function. In CBT, if you think that you will fail a test, you naturally start to feel anxious, frightened, and lose morale, and get really sad — after all, you think you are about to fail! It's pretty scary to fail. You start thinking about what's going to happen when you fail. All these actions actually prevent you from studying dutifully for the test and doing better on it.
We need to stop thinking of people using Cognitive Distortions as being irrational. In actual practice, we all have Cognitive Distortions (like Fortune Telling) in most of our thoughts. They are little shortcuts that we use all the time to get by, because we can't think infinitely about everything, so we use shortcuts that explain the evidence as best we can. The problem is that we can sometimes get stuck in depressive loops on deeply distorted thoughts.
In other words: a distortion by itself is not bad; but if you are doing bad, you are probably in a distortion.
So it's no surprise that people who are fragile, who feel any thought or statement could trigger them into a dangerous panic attack, tend to have distortions in their thinking.
Another way to put this is that people who are depressed and anxious are likely to be emotionally fragile and need restricted safe-spaces of speech in order to avoid being triggered into an anxious loop.
The problem is that we're letting college students, and the public at large, become depressed, anxious, and lonely. Our mental health is suffering a psychic epidemic, as Carl Jung put it. Getting mad at overly restrictive safe-spaces doesn't help. We need to cure the depression, and heal each other's psyches. Calling people irrational isn't going to help. We need to listen to each other, love one another, and heal and grow our way out of this, by caring for each other as individuals and mending each other's minds. We have to do this in love.