11-02-2021, 01:03 AM
Aaron Temkin Beck (July 18, 1921 – November 1, 2021) was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.[1][2] He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy[1][2][3] and cognitive behavioral therapy.[4] His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression.[5] In 1994, he and his daughter, the psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded the nonprofit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which provides CBT treatment and training and conducts CBT research.[6] Beck served as President Emeritus of the organization up until his death.
Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics. He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books.[7] He was named one of the "Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry", and one of the "five most influential psychotherapists of all time"[8] by The American Psychologist in July 1989. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.[9]
Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest of four children born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Elizabeth Temkin and Harry Beck.[10][11] He attended Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1942.[12] At Brown he was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, was an associate editor of The Brown Daily Herald, and received the Francis Wayland Scholarship, William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory, and Philo Sherman Bennett Essay Award.[13] Beck attended Yale Medical School, graduating with a Doctor of Medicine in 1946.[14]
He began to specialize in neurology, reportedly liking the precision of its procedures.[14] However, due to a shortage of psychiatry residents he was instructed to do a six-month rotation in that field, and became absorbed in psychoanalysis, despite initial wariness.[14]
Beck then joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954.[18] The department chair was Kenneth Ellmaker Appel, a psychoanalyst who was president of the American Psychiatric Association, whose efforts to expand the presence and relatedness of psychiatry had a big influence on Beck's career.[19] At the same time, Beck began formal training in psychoanalysis at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association.[19]
Beck's closest colleague was Marvin Stein, a friend since their army hospital days to whom Beck looked up for his scientific rigor in psychoneuroimmunology.[20] Beck's first research was with Leon J. Saul, a psychoanalyst known for unusual methods such as therapy by telephone or setting homework, who had developed inventory questionnaires to quantify ego processes in the manifest content of dreams (that which can be directly reported by the dreamer). Beck and a graduate student developed a new inventory they used to assess "masochistic" hostility in manifest dreams, published in 1959.[21] This study found themes of loss and rejection related to depression, rather than inverted hostility as predicted by psychoanalysis.[20] Developing the work with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Beck came up with what he would call the Beck Depression Inventory, which he published in 1961 and soon started to market, unsupported by Appel.[20] In another experiment, he found that depressed patients sought encouragement or improvement following disapproval, rather than seeking out suffering and failure as predicted by the Freudian anger-turned-inwards theory.[14]
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Through the 1950s, Beck adhered to the department's psychoanalytic theories while pursuing experimentation and harboring private doubts.[20] In 1961, however, controversy over whom to appoint as the new chair of psychiatry—specifically, fierce psychoanalytic opposition to the favored choice of biomedical researcher Eli Robins—brought matters to a head, an early skirmish in a power shift away from psychoanalysis nationally.[20] Beck tried to remain neutral and, with Albert J. Stunkard, opposed a petition to block Robins.[20] Stunkard, a behaviorist who specialized in obesity and who had dropped out of psychoanalytic training, was eventually appointed department head in the face of sustained opposition which again Beck would not engage in, putting him at bitter odds with his friend Stein.[20]
On top of this, despite having graduated from his Philadelphia training, the American Psychoanalytic Institute rejected (deferred) Beck's membership application in 1960, skeptical of his claims of success from relatively brief therapy and advising he conduct further supervised therapy on the more advanced or termination phases of a case, and again in 1961 when he had not done so but outlined his clinical and research work.[14] Such deferments were a tactic used by the Institute to maintain the orthodoxy in teaching, but Beck did not know this at the time and has described the decision as stupid and dumb.[14][20]
Beck usually explains his increasing belief in his cognitive model by reference to a patient he had been listening to for a year at the Penn clinic.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_T._Beck#cite_note-doctor-14][14] When he suggested she was anxious due to her ego being confronted by her sexual impulses, and asked her whether she believed this when she did not seem convinced, she said she was actually worried that she was being boring, and that she thought this often and with everyone.[14][22]
Working with depressed patients, Beck found that they experienced streams of negative thoughts that seemed to arise spontaneously.[30] He termed these cognitions "automatic thoughts", and discovered that their content fell into three categories: negative ideas about oneself, the world, and the future. He stated that such cognitions were interrelated as the cognitive triad.[30] Limited time spent reflecting on automatic thoughts would lead patients to treat them as valid.[31]
Beck began helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and behave more functionally.[31] He developed key ideas in CBT, explaining that different disorders were associated with different types of distorted thinking.[31] Distorted thinking has a negative effect on a person's behaviour no matter what type of disorder they had, he found.[31] Beck explained that successful interventions will educate a person to understand and become aware of their distorted thinking, and how to challenge its effects.[31] He discovered that frequent negative automatic thoughts reveal a person's core beliefs. He explained that core beliefs are formed over lifelong experiences; we "feel" these beliefs to be true.[31]
Since that time, Beck and his colleagues worldwide have researched the efficacy of this form of psychotherapy in treating a wide variety of disorders including depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, drug abuse, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and many other medical conditions with psychological components.[31] Cognitive therapy has also been applied with success to individuals with anxiety disorders and schizophrenia.[32] He also focused on cognitive therapy for schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and for patients who have had recurrent suicide attempts.[33]
Beck’s recent research on the treatment of schizophrenia has suggested that patients once believed to be non-responsive to treatment are amenable to positive change.[34] Even the most severe presentations of the illness, such as those involving long periods of hospitalization, bizarre behavior, poor personal hygiene, self-injury, and aggressiveness, can respond positively to a modified version of cognitive behavioural treatment.[35][36]
However, some mental health professionals have opposed Beck's cognitive models and resulting therapies as very mechanistic or too limited in which parts of mental activity they will consider.[37] Beck's work was presented as a far more scientific and experimentally-based development than psychoanalysis (while being less reductive than behaviourism), Beck's key principles were not necessarily based on the general findings and models of cognitive psychology or neuroscience developing at that time but were derived from personal clinical observations and interpretations in his therapy office.[23] And although there have been many cognitive models developed for different mental disorders and hundreds of outcome studies on the effectiveness of CBT—relatively easy because of the narrow, time-limited and manual-based nature of the treatment—there has been much less focus on experimentally proving the supposedly active mechanisms; in some cases the predicted causal relationships have not been found, such as between dysfunctional attitudes and outcomes.[38]
Beck was involved in research studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and conducted biweekly Case Conferences at Beck Institute for area psychiatric residents, graduate students, and mental health professionals.[39] He met every two weeks with conference participants and generally did two to three role plays. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.[40]
Beck was the founder and President Emeritus of the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy, and the director of the Psychopathology Research Center (PRC), which is the parent organization of the Center for the Treatment and Prevention of Suicide.[7] In 1986, he was a visiting scientist at Oxford University.[1]
He was professor emeritus at Penn since 1992,[7] and an adjunct professor at both Temple University and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.[1]
Beck was married in 1950 to Phyllis W. Beck, who was the first woman judge on the appellate court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,[41] and whose youngest daughter, Alice Beck Dubow, is a judge on the same court.[42] Together they had four children: Roy, Judy, Dan, and Alice.[13] Beck's daughter Judith is a prominent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) educator and clinician, who wrote the basic text in the field.[43] She is a co-founder of the non-profit Beck Institute.[43] He turned 100 on July 18, 2021, and died later in the year on November 1 at his home in Philadelphia.[44][45][46][47]
Along with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck developed the Beck Hopelessness Scale,[48] Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSS), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Youth Inventories,[49] Clark-Beck Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (CBOCI),[50] and BDI–Fast Screen for Medical Patients.[51]
Beck collaborated with psychologist Maria Kovacs in the development of the Children's Depression Inventory, which used the BDI as a template.[52][53]
More at Wikipedia.
Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics. He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books.[7] He was named one of the "Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry", and one of the "five most influential psychotherapists of all time"[8] by The American Psychologist in July 1989. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.[9]
Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest of four children born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Elizabeth Temkin and Harry Beck.[10][11] He attended Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1942.[12] At Brown he was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, was an associate editor of The Brown Daily Herald, and received the Francis Wayland Scholarship, William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory, and Philo Sherman Bennett Essay Award.[13] Beck attended Yale Medical School, graduating with a Doctor of Medicine in 1946.[14]
He began to specialize in neurology, reportedly liking the precision of its procedures.[14] However, due to a shortage of psychiatry residents he was instructed to do a six-month rotation in that field, and became absorbed in psychoanalysis, despite initial wariness.[14]
Beck then joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954.[18] The department chair was Kenneth Ellmaker Appel, a psychoanalyst who was president of the American Psychiatric Association, whose efforts to expand the presence and relatedness of psychiatry had a big influence on Beck's career.[19] At the same time, Beck began formal training in psychoanalysis at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association.[19]
Beck's closest colleague was Marvin Stein, a friend since their army hospital days to whom Beck looked up for his scientific rigor in psychoneuroimmunology.[20] Beck's first research was with Leon J. Saul, a psychoanalyst known for unusual methods such as therapy by telephone or setting homework, who had developed inventory questionnaires to quantify ego processes in the manifest content of dreams (that which can be directly reported by the dreamer). Beck and a graduate student developed a new inventory they used to assess "masochistic" hostility in manifest dreams, published in 1959.[21] This study found themes of loss and rejection related to depression, rather than inverted hostility as predicted by psychoanalysis.[20] Developing the work with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Beck came up with what he would call the Beck Depression Inventory, which he published in 1961 and soon started to market, unsupported by Appel.[20] In another experiment, he found that depressed patients sought encouragement or improvement following disapproval, rather than seeking out suffering and failure as predicted by the Freudian anger-turned-inwards theory.[14]
[/url]
Through the 1950s, Beck adhered to the department's psychoanalytic theories while pursuing experimentation and harboring private doubts.[20] In 1961, however, controversy over whom to appoint as the new chair of psychiatry—specifically, fierce psychoanalytic opposition to the favored choice of biomedical researcher Eli Robins—brought matters to a head, an early skirmish in a power shift away from psychoanalysis nationally.[20] Beck tried to remain neutral and, with Albert J. Stunkard, opposed a petition to block Robins.[20] Stunkard, a behaviorist who specialized in obesity and who had dropped out of psychoanalytic training, was eventually appointed department head in the face of sustained opposition which again Beck would not engage in, putting him at bitter odds with his friend Stein.[20]
On top of this, despite having graduated from his Philadelphia training, the American Psychoanalytic Institute rejected (deferred) Beck's membership application in 1960, skeptical of his claims of success from relatively brief therapy and advising he conduct further supervised therapy on the more advanced or termination phases of a case, and again in 1961 when he had not done so but outlined his clinical and research work.[14] Such deferments were a tactic used by the Institute to maintain the orthodoxy in teaching, but Beck did not know this at the time and has described the decision as stupid and dumb.[14][20]
Beck usually explains his increasing belief in his cognitive model by reference to a patient he had been listening to for a year at the Penn clinic.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_T._Beck#cite_note-doctor-14][14] When he suggested she was anxious due to her ego being confronted by her sexual impulses, and asked her whether she believed this when she did not seem convinced, she said she was actually worried that she was being boring, and that she thought this often and with everyone.[14][22]
Working with depressed patients, Beck found that they experienced streams of negative thoughts that seemed to arise spontaneously.[30] He termed these cognitions "automatic thoughts", and discovered that their content fell into three categories: negative ideas about oneself, the world, and the future. He stated that such cognitions were interrelated as the cognitive triad.[30] Limited time spent reflecting on automatic thoughts would lead patients to treat them as valid.[31]
Beck began helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and behave more functionally.[31] He developed key ideas in CBT, explaining that different disorders were associated with different types of distorted thinking.[31] Distorted thinking has a negative effect on a person's behaviour no matter what type of disorder they had, he found.[31] Beck explained that successful interventions will educate a person to understand and become aware of their distorted thinking, and how to challenge its effects.[31] He discovered that frequent negative automatic thoughts reveal a person's core beliefs. He explained that core beliefs are formed over lifelong experiences; we "feel" these beliefs to be true.[31]
Since that time, Beck and his colleagues worldwide have researched the efficacy of this form of psychotherapy in treating a wide variety of disorders including depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, drug abuse, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and many other medical conditions with psychological components.[31] Cognitive therapy has also been applied with success to individuals with anxiety disorders and schizophrenia.[32] He also focused on cognitive therapy for schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and for patients who have had recurrent suicide attempts.[33]
Beck’s recent research on the treatment of schizophrenia has suggested that patients once believed to be non-responsive to treatment are amenable to positive change.[34] Even the most severe presentations of the illness, such as those involving long periods of hospitalization, bizarre behavior, poor personal hygiene, self-injury, and aggressiveness, can respond positively to a modified version of cognitive behavioural treatment.[35][36]
However, some mental health professionals have opposed Beck's cognitive models and resulting therapies as very mechanistic or too limited in which parts of mental activity they will consider.[37] Beck's work was presented as a far more scientific and experimentally-based development than psychoanalysis (while being less reductive than behaviourism), Beck's key principles were not necessarily based on the general findings and models of cognitive psychology or neuroscience developing at that time but were derived from personal clinical observations and interpretations in his therapy office.[23] And although there have been many cognitive models developed for different mental disorders and hundreds of outcome studies on the effectiveness of CBT—relatively easy because of the narrow, time-limited and manual-based nature of the treatment—there has been much less focus on experimentally proving the supposedly active mechanisms; in some cases the predicted causal relationships have not been found, such as between dysfunctional attitudes and outcomes.[38]
Beck was involved in research studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and conducted biweekly Case Conferences at Beck Institute for area psychiatric residents, graduate students, and mental health professionals.[39] He met every two weeks with conference participants and generally did two to three role plays. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.[40]
Beck was the founder and President Emeritus of the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy, and the director of the Psychopathology Research Center (PRC), which is the parent organization of the Center for the Treatment and Prevention of Suicide.[7] In 1986, he was a visiting scientist at Oxford University.[1]
He was professor emeritus at Penn since 1992,[7] and an adjunct professor at both Temple University and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.[1]
Beck was married in 1950 to Phyllis W. Beck, who was the first woman judge on the appellate court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,[41] and whose youngest daughter, Alice Beck Dubow, is a judge on the same court.[42] Together they had four children: Roy, Judy, Dan, and Alice.[13] Beck's daughter Judith is a prominent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) educator and clinician, who wrote the basic text in the field.[43] She is a co-founder of the non-profit Beck Institute.[43] He turned 100 on July 18, 2021, and died later in the year on November 1 at his home in Philadelphia.[44][45][46][47]
Along with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck developed the Beck Hopelessness Scale,[48] Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSS), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Youth Inventories,[49] Clark-Beck Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (CBOCI),[50] and BDI–Fast Screen for Medical Patients.[51]
Beck collaborated with psychologist Maria Kovacs in the development of the Children's Depression Inventory, which used the BDI as a template.[52][53]
More at Wikipedia.
![[Image: 220px-Gloria_Vanderbilt_and_Wyatt_Emory_Cooper.jpg]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gloria_Vanderbilt_and_Wyatt_Emory_Cooper.jpg)