Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

Start from common sense2

The opening chapters, "Common sense and beyond" and "Tapping the internal communications", ground therapy in what patients consciously think and say to themselves.

Meaning drives emotion2

Chapters on "Meaning and emotions" and the "Cognitive content of the emotional disorders" tie each disorder to its typical themes of thought.

One model across disorders4

Beck's cognitive model began with depression; this book expanded it to anxiety disorders.

Automatic thoughts5

Depressed patients reported spontaneous negative thoughts, which Beck called automatic thoughts; they are the first target of cognitive therapy.

The paradoxes of depression6

Depression seems to reverse basic drives, such as survival and pleasure; the paradox dissolves once you know what the patient believes.

"The alarm is worse than the fire"2

Beck's chapter title for anxiety neurosis: the alarm reaction, not the danger itself, is the problem.

Principles before techniques2

The last chapters set out the principles and techniques of cognitive therapy, then its use for depression and its status as a treatment.

Too mechanistic?7

Beck's approach has sometimes been criticised as too mechanistic.

Mechanisms less tested than outcomes7

Far less work has tested the proposed active mechanisms than the outcomes, and some predicted causal links have not been found.

Cognitive Therapy of Depression

The treatment manual that turned these ideas into a session-by-session therapy.

The Anxiety and Worry Workbook

The same model applied to anxiety, written for the person who has it.

The Efficacy of CBT: A Review of Meta-analyses

What decades of trials later found about the therapy this book launched.