Cognitive Therapy of Depression

It is the interpretation, not the event2

How a person interprets a situation, not the situation itself, shapes how they feel and act; inaccurate beliefs produce needless distress.

Three parts of the model2

The cognitive model explains depression with the negative cognitive triad, schemas, and cognitive errors.

Change the thinking, and it lasts2

Medication works while it is taken; cognitive therapy appears to have an effect that lasts after treatment ends (Cuijpers et al., 2013).

The negative cognitive triad2

Depressed people hold negative views of themselves, their world and their future, which seem accurate to them while depressed.

Schemas2

Relatively stable clusters of beliefs that steer what a person notices and how they read it.

Cognitive errors2

Systematic distortions such as all-or-none thinking and disqualifying the positive keep negative beliefs alive despite contrary evidence.

Collaborative empiricism2

Therapist and patient work together to find problem beliefs and test them against evidence, rather than relying on the therapist's authority.

Behavioural work from session one2

Patients monitor what they do and how mood changes, with activity schedules and homework throughout treatment.

The man who stops applying for jobs2

He believes he is incompetent, so does not apply; then takes being unemployed as proof he is incompetent, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Beck's own turn from psychoanalysis2

Beck looked for inward-turned hostility in depressed patients' dreams and found themes of loss and defeat instead, which led to the cognitive theory.

All-or-none thinking2

The book's example of a dichotomous self-label: "I am completely unlovable."

Bipolar depression is open2

The authors say its use for unipolar depression rests on multiple controlled trials; whether it helps bipolar depression remains an open question.

Mechanisms less tested than outcomes3

Much less work has tested the active mechanisms of Beck's approach than its outcomes, and some predicted causal links were not found.

Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders

Where the schema ideas of this manual go when problems are lifelong.

The Efficacy of CBT: A Review of Meta-analyses

How CBT for depression and other problems did across 106 meta-analyses.

The Great Psychotherapy Debate

The case that specific techniques like these matter less than shared factors.