Aaron Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1921. He was the youngest of four children born to Elizabeth Temkin and Harry Beck, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Harry worked as a printer and Elizabeth's family found financial success in tobacco wholesaling; the family belonged to the upwardly-mobile vanguard of Providence's Eastern European-Jewish immigrant community. At the time of Aaron's birth, the Temkin-Becks lived a "comfortable, lower-middle class lifestyle" and were in the process of putting down roots on Providence's East Side. In 1923, when Aaron was two years old, the family purchased a house at 43/41 Sessions Street in the city's Blackstone neighborhood. yearbook photograph Beck attended John Howland Grammar School, Nathan Bishop Junior High, and Hope Street High School, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1938. As an adolescent, Beck dreamed of becoming a journalist. At Brown, he was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa society, was an associate editor of The Brown Daily Herald, and received the Francis Wayland Scholarship, William Gaston Prize for Excellence in Oratory, and Philo Sherman Bennett Essay Award. Beck attended Yale Medical School, planning to become an internist and work in private practice in Providence. He graduated from Yale with a Doctor of Medicine in 1946. ==Career==

After receiving his M.D., Beck completed a six-month junior residency in pathology at Rhode Island Hospital and a three-year residency in neurology at Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts. During this time, Beck began to specialize in neurology, reportedly liking the precision of its procedures. At that time, it was a center of ego psychology with an unusual degree of collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists, including David Rapaport. Beck then completed military service as assistant chief of neuropsychiatry at Valley Forge Army Hospital in the United States Military. Penn psychiatry Beck then joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. The department chair was Kenneth Ellmaker Appel, a psychoanalyst who was president of the American Psychiatric Association, whose efforts to expand the presence and relatedness of psychiatry had a big influence on Beck's career. At the same time, Beck began formal training in psychoanalysis at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Beck's closest colleague was Marvin Stein, a friend since their army hospital days to whom Beck looked up to for his scientific rigor in psychoneuroimmunology. This study found themes of loss and rejection related to depression, rather than inverted hostility as predicted by psychoanalysis. In another experiment, he found that depressed patients sought encouragement or improvement following disapproval, rather than seeking out suffering and failure as predicted by the Freudian anger-turned-inwards theory. Private practice In 1962, Beck requested a sabbatical and would go into private practice for five years. Beck's first articles on the cognitive theory of depression, in 1963 and 1964 in the Archives of General Psychiatry, maintained the psychiatric context of ego psychology but then turned to concepts of realistic and scientific thinking in the terms of the new cognitive psychology, extended to become a therapeutic need. Beck recalled that Ellis contacted him in the mid-1960s after his two articles in the Archives of General Psychiatry, and therefore he discovered Ellis had developed a rich theory and pragmatic therapy that he was able to use to some extent as a framework blended with his own, though he disliked Ellis's technique of telling patients what he thought was going on rather than helping the client to learn for themselves empirically. Psychoanalyst Gerald E. Kochansky remarked in 1975 in a review of one of Beck's books that he could no longer tell if Beck was a psychoanalyst or a devotee of Ellis. Both Beck and Ellis cited aspects of the ancient philosophical system of Stoicism as a forerunner of their ideas. Beck cited Epictetus as an influence from Stoicism. In 1967, becoming active again at University of Pennsylvania, Beck still described himself and his new therapy (as he always would quietly) as neo-Freudian in the ego psychology school, albeit focused on interactions with the environment rather than internal drives. He offered cognitive therapy work as a relatively "neutral" space and a bridge to psychology. With a monograph on depression that Beck published in 1967, according to historian Rachael Rosner: "Cognitive Therapy entered the marketplace as a corrective experimentalist psychological framework both for himself and his patients and for his fellow psychiatrists." ==Cognitive therapy==

Working with depressed patients, Beck found that they experienced streams of negative thoughts that seemed to arise spontaneously. He termed these cognitions "automatic thoughts", and discovered that their content fell into three categories: negative ideas about oneself, the world, and the future. He stated that such cognitions were interrelated as the cognitive triad. Beck began helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and behave more functionally. He also focused on cognitive therapy for schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and for patients who have had recurrent suicide attempts. Beck's recent research on the treatment of schizophrenia has suggested that patients once believed to be non-responsive to treatment are amenable to positive change. Even the most severe presentations of the illness, such as those involving long periods of hospitalization, bizarre behavior, poor personal hygiene, self-injury, and aggressiveness, can respond positively to a modified version of cognitive behavioral treatment. Although Beck's approach has sometimes been criticized as too mechanistic, modern CBT stresses the importance of a warm and encouraging therapeutic relationship and tailoring treatment to the specific challenges of each individual. Beck's work was presented as a far more scientific and experimentally-based development than psychoanalysis (while being less reductive than behaviorism), Beck's key principles were not necessarily based on the general findings and models of cognitive psychology or neuroscience developing at that time but were derived from personal clinical observations and interpretations in his therapy office. And although there have been many cognitive models developed for different mental disorders and hundreds of outcome studies on the effectiveness of CBT—relatively easy because of the narrow, time-limited and manual-based nature of the treatment—there has been much less focus on experimentally proving the supposedly active mechanisms; in some cases the predicted causal relationships have not been found, such as between dysfunctional attitudes and outcomes. ==Organizations==

Beck was involved in research studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and conducted biweekly Case Conferences at Beck Institute for area psychiatric residents, graduate students, and mental health professionals. He met every two weeks with conference participants and generally did two to three role plays. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. Beck was the founder and President Emeritus of the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and the director of the Aaron T. Beck Psychopathology Research Center, which was the parent organization of the Center for the Treatment and Prevention of Suicide, which is now known as the Penn Center for the Prevention of Suicide. While the Center for CT-R was created at Penn, it was later absorbed by Beck Institute. ==Personal life and death==

Beck was married in 1950 to Honorable Phyllis W. Beck (ret.), and they had four children together: Roy, Judy, Dan, and Alice. Phyllis was the first woman judge on the appellate court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Her youngest daughter, Alice Beck Dubow, is a judge on the same court, while the older daughter Judith is a prominent CBT educator and clinician, who wrote the basic text in the field He turned 100 on July 18, 2021, and died later in the year on November 1 in his sleep at his home in Philadelphia. ==Questionnaires==

Along with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck developed the Beck Hopelessness Scale, Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSS), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Youth Inventories, Clark-Beck Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (CBOCI), Personality Belief Questionnaire (PBQ), Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS), Suicide Intent Scale (SIS), Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale (SAS), Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale (CTRS), Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS), Satisfaction with Therapy Questionnaire (STQ) and BDI–Fast Screen for Medical Patients. Beck collaborated with psychologist Maria Kovacs in the development of the Children's Depression Inventory, which used the BDI as a template. ==Selected awards and honors==

• The 7th Annual Heinz Award in the Human Condition • The 2010 Bell of Hope Award • The 2010 Scholarship and Research Award In 2017, Medscape named Beck the fourth most influential physician in the past century. ==Works==

Selected books • Beck, A.T. (1967). The diagnosis and management of depression. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. • Beck, A.T. (1972). Depression: Causes and treatment. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. • Beck, A.T. (1975). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, Inc. • Beck, A.T., Rush, A.J., Shaw, B.F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. New York, NY: Guilford Press. • Beck, A.T., Wright, F.D., Newman, C.F., & Liese, B.S. (1993). Cognitive therapy of substance abuse. New York: Guilford Press. • Beck, A.T. (1999). Prisoners of hate: The cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. • Newman, C., Leahy, R. L., Beck, A. T., Reilly-Harringon, N. A., Gyulai, L. (2002). Bipolar disorder: A cognitive therapy approach. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. • Beck, A.T., Freeman, A., & Davis, D.D. (2003). Cognitive therapy of personality disorders. New York, NY: Guilford Press. • Beck, A.T., Emery, G., & Greenberg, R.L. (2005). Anxiety disorders and phobias: A cognitive perspective. New York, NY: Basic Books. • Beck, A.T., Rector, N.A., Stolar, N., & Grant, P. (2008). Schizophrenia: Cognitive theory, research, and therapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press. • Beck, A. T. & Alford, B. A. (2009). Depression: Causes and Treatments (2nd ed). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. • Beck, A.T. & David A. Clark (2012). The Anxiety and Worry Workbook: The Cognitive Behavioral Solution. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Selected articles • Beck, A.T., & Haigh, E. A.-P. (2014). "Advances in Cognitive Theory and Therapy: The Generic Cognitive Model". Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 1–24. • Beck, A. T., & Bredemeier, K. (2016). "A Unified Model of Depression Integrating Clinical, Cognitive, Biological, and Evolutionary Perspectives". Clinical Psychological Science, 4(4), 596–619. • Beck, A. T. (2019). "A 60-Year Evolution of Cognitive Theory and Therapy". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(1), 16–20. ==See also==