Aaron Beck spent his entire life proving that psychotherapy works. By his example, the psychiatrist showed how from a poor, fearful and nervous boy from an emigrant family, he turned into one of the most influential psychotherapists in the country and even in the world. Beck is rightfully called “father of cognitive behavior therapy” – he created it, he introduced new methods of assessing mental disorders and he successfully treated his patients with them. It is as a result of Beck’s scientific research on therapy, in particular, of depression, that cognitive behavioral therapy has become the preferred treatment for many mental disorders. His journey to establishing a working theory was long and thorny. The excessive criticism from his fellow researchers did not stop him in his researches, and in 1976, his monography Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders were finally published.
The main idea of Beck’s cognitive therapy is that information processing is a decisive factor for the survival of an organism. As a result, behavioral programs are born. In the event of a cognitive shift in information processing, an abnormal program begins to form, resulting in a mental disorder. Beck (2008) himself states that “the depressive cognitions contained errors or distortions in the interpretations (or misinterpretations) of experience”. This was a revolutionary thought, as the previously popular psychoanalysis emphasized on neurosis being caused by unconscious factors that can be identified only with the help of psychoanalytic interpretations. With his cognitive therapy, Beck created a brand new approach to the research and treatment of mental disorders. Later, Aaron Beck created his now widely used scales, such as Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Hopelessness Scale, Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation and Beck Anxiety Inventory. In my opinion, his studies were one of the most impactful for Cognitive Psychology, as they introduced mental disorders treatment methods, which we’re working.
Reference
Beck, A. T. (2008). The Evolution of the Cognitive Model of Depression and Its Neurobiological Correlates. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(8), 969–977. Web.