Who Is The Founder Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Who Is The Founder Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that is used to treat a variety of mental disorders. The patient, always referred to as the client, works with the therapists to learn ways of identifying problems and then solving them.

Basically cognitive behavioral therapy is used to change the person's thinking, behavior and emotional response to a problem and this helps the person look at the problem in a different and positive perspective.

Although CBT is extremely popular these days and is considered one of the best therapies for many mental disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, anxiety, phobias, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, bulimia and schizophrenia, many people do not know Who Is The Founder Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ?.

The founder of cognitive behavioral therapy is Aaron T. Beck, M.D., who graduated from Brown University and Yale Medical School. Dr Beck developed cognitive behavioral therapy in the early 1960s when he was a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Beck, initially, was a psychoanalyst who carried out a lot of research to test psychoanalytic concepts of depression. While conducting his experiments, he was certain that the research would validate the concepts of psychoanalysis but was shocked to see the opposite. He then started looking for more ways of conceptualizing depression and this led him to work with depressed patients.

While Dr. Beck was working with depressed patients, he found out that they experienced a series of negative thoughts that came spontaneously. He termed these thoughts as automatic thoughts. He also discovered that the content of these automatic thoughts could be placed in three categories, namely negative thoughts about themselves, negative thoughts about the world and negative thoughts about the future. It is here that Dr. Beck started helping his patients identify these negative thoughts and then evaluating them. This led to the patients being able to think a lot more realistically and in turn the patients used to feel better emotionally and they tended to behave in a more functional manner.

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Who Is The Founder Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy