David D. Burns
Psychiatrist, author of feeling-good (1980), and the person who moved cognitive-behavioral-therapy from a clinical programme into a mass-market paperback.
Amherst BA 1964, Stanford MD 1970, psychiatric residency at the University of Pennsylvania to 1974, board certified 1976, trained under aaron-beck. Adjunct professor emeritus in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, previously at Harvard Medical School and acting chief of psychiatry at Presbyterian/University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. A.E. Bennett Award 1975; the APA’s Distinguished Contribution to Psychology through Media award in 1995, which is the credential that best describes what he did. He credits a 1988 Phil Donahue Show appearance with the jump in his public profile. Later work: The Feeling Good Handbook (1989), Feeling Great (2020), and TEAM-CBT (Testing, Empathy, Assessment of resistance, Methods), which adds motivation and resistance to the cognitive model.
The two registers. Burns argues that antidepressant efficacy research carries drug-favouring biases and that the true benefit may be small beyond placebo — a rigour argument, and the kind this spoke exists to take seriously. The jacket of his own book promises techniques that will “immediately” lift the reader’s spirits and depression “cured without drugs” (feeling-good). The evidence for the book is a set of small bibliotherapy trials, several with therapist contact.
That is not the same failure as bessel-van-der-kolk‘s, and the difference is worth keeping straight. Van der Kolk’s central empirical claims were audited and largely unsupported. Burns’s central claim — reading this book helps depressed people — was tested and supported, at a size and scope smaller than the marketing. One is a claim that failed; the other is a modest true claim sold immodestly. The corpus’s category for this is register, not fraud.
Connections
- author of feeling-good
- trained by aaron-beck
- popularizer of cognitive-behavioral-therapy
Related
aaron-beck · cognitive-behavioral-therapy · feeling-good · bessel-van-der-kolk · anna-lembke · synthesis