Cognitive Therapy of Depression
The manual that made CBT testable, and therefore fundable.
Cognitive therapy is an active, directive, time-limited, structured approach used to treat a variety of psychiatric disorders.
Cognitive Therapy of Depression sets out a full treatment protocol for depressed patients, session by session, from the first interview through termination. Beck and his co-authors argue that depression is sustained by a patient's habitual reading of self, world, and future, and that changing how a patient tests those readings changes mood and behavior. The book couples that model with concrete method: agenda-setting, homework, activity scheduling, and the recording and questioning of automatic thoughts.
For a clinician, its value is procedural. It supplies interview transcripts, worked examples of common thinking errors, and guidance on the therapeutic relationship, pacing, and the risks of a purely technical stance. Chapters address suicidal patients, when to combine therapy with medication, and how to structure a course of roughly fifteen to twenty sessions.
Published in 1979, it wrote down what had until then been clinical lore, in a form other practitioners could follow, teach, and put to trial.
About the authors
Aaron Temkin Beck
Aaron T. Beck (1921 to 2021) was an American psychiatrist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, widely regarded as the founder of cognitive therapy, the approach now known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). He first trained as a psychoanalyst at the Philadelphia Institute before his clinical work with depressed patients led him toward a present-focused method built around observable thoughts. He also created the Beck Depression Inventory, a standard measure of symptom severity still used across clinical practice.
Augustus John Rush
A. John Rush is an American psychiatrist and depression researcher. He is professor emeritus at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, and he previously served as vice chair of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He co-authored Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979) with Aaron Beck and colleagues, led the STAR-D treatment trial, and developed rating scales for depressive symptoms, including the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology.
Brian Shaw
Brian F. Shaw is a clinical psychologist based in Toronto. He is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where his work spans cognitive-behavioural therapy, addiction, and depression and anxiety. He was one of the four authors of Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979), the treatment manual he wrote with Aaron Beck, A. John Rush, and Gary Emery. He also maintains a private clinical practice in the city.
Gary Emery
Gary Emery was a clinical psychologist who practised in the United States. He spent a decade at the Center for Cognitive Therapy in Philadelphia, then relocated to Los Angeles. He was one of the original authors of Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979), the treatment manual developed with Aaron Beck, A. John Rush, and Brian F. Shaw, and he later collaborated with Beck on a cognitive treatment manual for anxiety disorders and phobias.
Details
- 1979
- English
- Guilford Press
- Guilford Press, 1979
- 425
- 9780898629194