Product Description

The founder of cognitive therapy and two colleagues apply the basic concepts of cognitive therapy, used successfully for many years in treating depression, to the treatment of anxiety disorders and phobias.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #941547 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"Indispensable reading for students and experienced practitioners alike." -- --Hans Strupp, Ph.D.A

"The authors succeed in adding the very important cognitive dimension to our understanding of the anxiety disorders...strongly recommended." -- --Nancy C. Andreason,American Journal of Psychiatry

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Beck's Anxiety Disorders and Phobias - Cognitive Perspective
Every day, veterans of the Vietnam War commit suicide in deep depression. With the United States almost continually cutting its Veterans Administration budget, you would think that the V.A. would give up, but books like those of Beck help it treat and cure depression and anxiety. The Cognitive Therapy uses Socratic questioning, training people to ask why they feel sad or anxious, what their answers mean, to substitute more effective coping thoughts for ineffective thoughts and wrong ideas (illogical ideas, like "everybody is against me," "I'm born to fail," etc.). Patients record in diaries or logs what events trigger these wrong thoughts and learn to instantly respond with other thoughts and actions. This is one of the greatest books in psychology and psychiatry, and should be read by the young people of all ages (many of whom are depressed) as well as the older ones.

Very insightful - for patients as well as therapists
I picked up this book years ago (before getting therapy for my own anxiety disorder) and quickly gained much insight into the many variants of phobia and anxiety disorders. The explanations are clear, allowing laypersons as well as experts a good level of understanding.

While the book is definitely geared toward therapists interested in learning Beck's cognitive therapy approach, it is certainly useful to any patient or relative who is confronted with such problems -- above all the first half of the book! I really appreciated not being talked down to as in so many patient-oriented books.

Beck opens with an overview of everyday experience of fear and anxiety. Next, he describes the adaptive purpose of anxiety responses ("fight or flight") putting anxiety disorders on a dimension with normal behavior. He continues on to discuss the difference between "normal" and "pathological" forms of anxiety, addressing the major symptoms and thought patterns associated with clinical forms. He then gives an overview of clinical anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, atypical anxiety disorder, phobic disorders (of which there are many kinds), agoraphobia, social phobia and simple phobias.

He then presents his cognitive model of threat reactions and in-depth chapters focussing on anxiety disorder clusters ("Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder", "Simple Phobias", "The Agoraphobic Syndrome", and "The Evaluation Anxieties" social phobia and social anxiety). The second part of the book is devoted to his principles and strategies/techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

The fact that new editions of this book have been published every few years over the past 2 decades is a tribute to its usefulness.

Interesting but intense
This book was an interesting book and, undoubtedly, an important book from the professional stand-point. However, from the layman's stand-point, I thought it was a little too intense. There were sections that I had to go back and reread several times in order to understand what the authors were trying to say. I think this was because I am a layman with only General Psych 101 as a background. I can not, however, speak as to its rating for a professional.