Ryan Donnell for The New York Times
Dr. Aaron T. Beck, a psychiatrist, developed cognitive therapy.
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn helped discover the enzyme telomerase.
Posted on 09/16/2006 8:23:25 PM PDT by neverdem
The psychiatrist who upset Freudian dogma in the 1960’s by developing cognitive therapy is one of five winners of this year’s Lasker Awards, widely considered the nation’s most prestigious medical prizes.
The awards, announced yesterday by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, are also going to four scientists who made important discoveries about aging and cancer. Mary Lasker created the awards in 1946 as a birthday gift to her husband, Albert, in hopes of curing cancer in 10 years. Each award carries a $100,000 prize.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Aaron T. Beck, 85, of the University of Pennsylvania, won the Lasker clinical research award. Dr. Beck’s technique, cognitive therapy, transformed the treatment of depression and many other mental health conditions.
Cognitive therapy “is one of the most important advances — if not the most important advance — in the treatment of mental diseases in the last 50 years,” said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, the chairman of the Lasker jury.
The therapy is a counseling technique in which patients learn to head off or defuse self-defeating thoughts before acting on them. Dr. Beck and his students showed that cognitive therapy can reverse serious mental illnesses in weekly sessions over two or three months.
In making those advances, Dr. Beck set a new standard for determining...
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Dr. Beck published much of his work in his own journal, Cognitive Therapy and Research, in part because other psychiatrists resisted, if not rejected, his findings.
Dr. Beck understood the reluctance. In a letter in The New York Times on March 6, 1983, he wrote that he empathized with his critics. He said that in the late 1950’s his research had “set out to prove that anger turned against the self played a central role in depression,” but to his surprise it “ultimately refuted this hypothesis.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Tim Beck, magisterial psychiatrist ... he of the ASCAP Evolutionary Psychiatry annual award. Way to go, Tim!!!
BTTT
When it comes to Endogenous Depression, Beck's cognitive therapy is like putting a bandaid on cancer.
The award to Beck is well deserved. Cognitive therapy is quite effective for many problems, particularly depression. It's too bad our society is so enamored with drugs.
"count your blessings"..."smile and maybe you'll feel like smiling"...where's my prize...?
Psychiatrists know as much about the human mind and soul as this guy.
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