Word: becking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When I first saw Beck at the therapy convention in November, I mistook him for a diffident patrician, an image he seemed to project with his neatly trimmed white hair, bow tie, tweed jacket, gray socks and grandfatherly laugh. In fact, Beck-the son of a Ukrainian socialist father and a "rather dominant" Russian mother, according to Weishaar-is a tireless defender of his therapy. He spoke to me with bemusement about the new wave of therapies. "I don't think you call something a revolution until it's actually happened," he said, chuckling. "You get new, popular approaches that...
...Beck did say mindfulness therapies are "worth a try," and he noted that he has always said acceptance of difficult thoughts can have a role early in therapy. But in the weeks after the convention, the debate between Beck's followers and Hayes' turned acrimonious. Having just returned from the conference, Robert Leahy, president-elect of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy (current president: Judith Beck), posted a message on the academy's listserv saying Hayes' language theory "sounds less like a 'science' than a frame of reference for a new religion ... Haven't we all been down that dark pathway...
...part, Beck co-authored a paper in the most recent Clinical Psychology Review noting that cognitive therapy "is one of the most extensively researched forms of psychotherapy." The paper summarizes the results of 16 studies of a collective 9,995 subjects and finds a large effect for cognitive therapy in the treatment of unipolar depression, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, social phobia and panic disorder-Hayes' condition. Cognitive therapy was also shown to be somewhat superior to antidepressants. After sending me the paper, Beck e-mailed derisively, "The last time there was a claim for a New Wave...
...fundamental questions about the therapy haven't been resolved. That's partly because cognitive therapy involves a variety of techniques. In addition to questioning negative thoughts in the therapy office, cognitive therapists use behavioral homework assignments-for instance, phobic patients may be asked to expose themselves to fears (like Beck going through the tunnel). Depressed clients are asked to schedule regular activities. But if cognitive therapy is all those things, critics say, maybe getting better is a matter of merely changing old behaviors, not questioning negative beliefs...
...Beck hypothesizes that the cognitive parts of the therapy-challenging thoughts, developing new beliefs-add value to the changes in everyday behavior and routine that the therapy encourages. But he acknowledges that no trial has proved that. In fact, a team at the University of Washington has shown in two studies that the cognitive elements of the therapy add nothing. Among more severely depressed patients, behavioral techniques like setting up new routines and scheduling activities worked as well as an antidepressant and significantly better than cognitive therapy. When I asked Beck about the studies, he called them "intriguing" but-since...