Aaron Beck Depression

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) addresses dysfunctional emotions, maladaptive behaviors, and cognitive processes. This is an effective treatment for patients who are dealing with anxiety and depression. CBT refers to a group of psychotherapies that incorporate techniques from cognitive therapy and behavior therapy. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck are the two psychologists who came up with therapies. Beck developed the cognitive therapy (CT) that focuses on changing the client’s unrealistic maladaptive beliefs and thoughts in order to change the individual’s behavior and emotional state. To help CT is directive collaboration by help teach the client correct their distorted thinking and perception of self,

This instrument was developed by Aaron T. Beck who is a pioneer cognitive therapist. This instrument is commonly called the BDI and was developed in 1961. It was adapted in 1969 and a copyright was obtained in 1979. In developing the instrument Beck used a series of questions which enabled him to adequately measure the strength severity and complexity of depression. There are two versions of BDI, a long version which has 21 questions mostly used to measure specific symptom common with all patient suffering from depression. The shorter version which is composed of seven questions is meant to be used in a primary healthcare setting, with main purpose to evaluate, and monitor changes in of depression.

“Cognitive therapy first came to the attention of British psychologists and psychiatrists through the pioneering work of the British researchers who sought to evaluate the efficacy of Beck’s treatment for depression.”

Personification is used to show what nonhuman objects or things are doing. Connell uses it to tell his readers what a boat’s wake is really representing. He writes, “...the wash from the speeding yacht slapped him in the face” (Connell 19). He wanted to portray that Rainsford was not able to speak or shout at the boat to get anyone's attention.

The Hasty Generalization fallacy is an inductive generalization, wherein a sample of the population is responsible for the conclusion representing the entire population. A number of categories are contained in this fallacy, including insufficient statistics, overgeneralization, and samples not accurately represented. The hasty generalization fallacy is often referred to as “jumping to conclusions” or the use of limited samples, and can be prone to instant gratification; the smaller samples and statistics allow for a quicker result although the outcomes could be infinite.

Beck introduced the term “automatic thoughts”, which are a person’s responses towards specific stimuli. When these beliefs are not held in a logical and reasonable way they are considered cognitive distortions, which cause issues in people’s lives and tend to be the reasons why individuals seek counseling. He believes that there we specific cognitive distortions people hold. One of these distortions is arbitrary inference, which is thinking the worst of a situation, without any evidence. Next is selective abstraction, which is only basing your conclusion on one event or one piece of information. There is also overgeneralization, where individuals take one belief or concept and apply it to every situation, no matter the relevance. Another distortion is magnification and minimization of facts, where someone over emphasizes a negative event, or diminishes the positive events. Personalization is a distortion in which one relates all events back to themselves, as if they had control and it was their fault something when wrong. Mislabeling and labeling is the act of an individual having negative views about themselves based on past actions and events. Finally, dichotomous thinking is a distortion Beck views as seeing the world in extremes. A person holds an either-or type of view of the world and sees no middle ground. The goal of cognitive therapy is to recognize these thoughts and rearrange them into positive views, while making logical and rational decisions(Corey,

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) grew out of dissatisfaction of certain therapists with traditional psychoanalysis. Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis were both instrumental in the development of this approach to psychotherapy (Van Bilsen, p. 7), though Beck, a psychoanalyst, is primarily credited with its development. Beck did research on depression, in the 1950’s, which was intended to give evidence in support of the theory that retroflected hostility was at the root of depression, but the research failed to confirm his hypothesis. As a result, he expanded his research on depression and came to the realization that depressed subjects held predictably negative thoughts about themselves, the future and the world around

Cognitive-behavioral therapy was developed by Aaron Beck (Hammen 141). It assumes that the patient's faulty thinking is causing the current depression and focuses on changing the depressed patient's thought patterns and perceptions. The therapist helps the patient identify negative or distorted thought patterns and the emotions and behavior that accompany them, and then retrains the depressed individual to recognize the thinking

An example of personification is “ The dust did a scoop itself like hands.” The wind blew the dust and dirt off the ground. This is a sign that some kind bad weather is about to happen. The dust did not actually scoop itself so that is why this is personification.

Eric Beck was a 32-year-old single Caucasian man when he arrived at the psychiatric hospital. At the time, Eric was living with his parents and working part-time as a night watchman for a large professional building in the city. Although he had worked as a stockbroker and trained as a paralegal, Eric had been underemployed for several years.

The philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy is that “think and feeling are connected people are creative (Halbur & Halbur, 2015, p.47)”. The key aspects of theory are to challenge the irrational beliefs that we hold about ourselves. Aaron Beck the primary founder of cognitive behavior theory assumed that people can control how they feel and what they think. He believed that our inner thoughts and beliefs affected how we are affected on the outside. One of the key concepts is that the client’s dysfunctional thinking can be derived from an erroneous internal process or bias.

Aaron Beck is an American psychiatrist and a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania (GoodTheraoy.org). Beck has had an interest in the changes of human nature goes as far back as he can remember. Beck is known as a trailblazer in the psychology world because he focused on disoriented thoughts that lead to problematic behaviors such as depression. “Beck struggled to find a way to help his depressed client’s better capture their emotions. He realized that many of his depressed clients experienced recurring negative thoughts and that as long as they believed these thoughts to be true, they would continue to have symptoms of depression”(GoodTherapy.org). Beck spent much of his career at the University of Pennsylvania and advocated for the application of cognitive behavioral therapy in the treatment of depression and other mood problems (GoodTherapy.org).

From this realization, he created an intervention geared towards altering individuals’ negative self-concepts and challenging their way of thinking. Beck’s cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the cognitive model theory (Heffner, n.d.). The cognitive model holds the premise that our thoughts are responsible for how we behave. So, flawed thinking is at the root of all mental disorders. Beck used cognitive model to understand that a change in the mental process can treat depression (Beck, 2005). Although Beck’s cognitive therapy intervention started off as a treatment for depression; it has been modified and adapted to fit the needs of many different mental and psychical illnesses.

Aaron Beck developed the cognitive therapy concept in the 1960s. Beck was very ill as a child and perceive his mother to be depressed and unpredictable due to losing two children in their infancy due to illness. Beck graduated from Brown University and Yale Medical School. According to Beck’s daughter Judith, cognitive therapy is based on the ideas of the stoic philosophers in Greece and Rome (Seligman et al, 2014, p. 294) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was founded by Donald Meichenbaum, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. While he was working on his dissertation for his doctoral degree, he noticed that people with schizophrenia who were taught healthy self-talk fared better in other measures than those with schizophrenia who were not talk about healthy self talk.

Personification is a figure of speech in which a thing, an idea or an animal is given human attributes. The non-human objects are portrayed in such a way that we feel they have the ability to act like human beings. Personification is the figurative language that is giving the attribute of human beings to animal, an object or a concept. It is sub type of metaphor, an implied comparison in which the figurative term of the comparison is always human being. (Perrine, 1977: 64).