Famous Mental Health Doctor Aaron Beck Dies at Age 100

The death of Dr. Aaron Beck has been unsettling news in the world of mental health. This remarkable developer of cognitive behavior therapy died recently, at age one hundred.

I personally learned of the news about the death of the prominent mental health doctor at a time when my mind was already on the subject.

I had just finished listening to a local newscast, reporting on the topic of adolescents and mental health. The subject of human behavior and humanity in general is always of interest to me.

So my ears perked up and I listened intently to the report. What I heard was disturbing.

Prevalence of mental health issues in 2021

It's no secret that the pandemic is responsible for the prevalence of mental health issues in 2021. The newscast I heard today only helps to drive that point home even further.

Researchers are saying that the amount of adolescent's screen time has doubled since the pandemic, and NO, this does not include the time spent with online learning.

This study is specific to time spent streaming, gaming, cosplay, searching, and texting. But what's even worse, as a result of this excessive screen time, they are seeing more cases of depression in this same group.

This information lines up with the recent news and scandal about the negative affects of time spent on Facebook, and let's not even get started on Instagram and Youtube, let alone Tik Tok.

The unsettling news about the death of Dr. Beck

This information was unsettling enough, but then I changed the channel and went to another news station and heard about the death of Dr. Aaron Beck.

Dr. Beck was a notable figure in the field of psychiatry, and his contribution helped to literally change the entire approach to the way mental health is treated.

A New York Times (NYT) report said that Dr. Aaron T. Beck, the developer of what we now know as cognitive behavior therapy, died while in his home, on Monday, November 1 (2021). 

Beck was a centenarian, having lived to the ripe age of 100 years-old. His theories about mental health were truly revolutionary, at a time when others in his field were taking a less than helpful approach to mental health issues. The way Dr. Beck approached the problem completely changed the game.

According to the Times report:

"It was an answer to Freudian analysis: a pragmatic, thought-monitoring approach to treating anxiety, depression and other mental disorders, and it changed psychiatry."

What was Dr. Aaron Beck's new approach to mental health based on?

As a young psychiatrist Dr. Aaron T. Beck trained in Freudian analysis. But in the late 1950s, he began changing his approach when he started encouraging patients to focus on whatever issues were occurring in their day-to-day lives, rather than old and buried conflicts from childhood.

Because of the "automatic thoughts" that Dr. Beck discovered humans typically generate, he began to focus his study on these unexamined assumptions that human beings are prone to make.

In other words, the negative self talk that we do, even in a subconscious way, could potentially be at the root of mental health issues that we face. 

This theory was out of line with the popular view at the time, which was to automatically start delving into the patient's past, specifically their childhood.

Beck went even further by suggesting patients do an exploration into some of these assumptions, and test them out, as a way to reveal the true source of the problem.

His belief was that negative assumptions about oneself, when unexamined, manged to result in self-criticism, and feelings of despair. 

Beck theorized that it was these feelings that ultimately led to self-defeating attempts at trying to compensate. He pointed to negative behavior such as promiscuity, drug use and heavy drinking as an example.

The NYT report further stated:

"Dr. Beck found that he could undermine those assumptions by prompting people to test them out in the world - say, by socializing without alcohol to observe what happens - and to gather countervailing evidence from their own experience, like memories of healthy relationships."

How Dr. Beck's work and theories progressed over the years

Over the course of time, Dr. Beck's work, was paired with a psychologist by the name of Albert Ellis, who had been working independently, along the same line of thought. The two of them are said to have provided the architecture for what we now refer to as Cognitive Behavior Therapy (C.B.T.). 

C.B.T. is the most extensively studied form of psychotherapy today, and not just in America, but worldwide. In fact, it is the foundation for a nationwide treatment program located in England, where a number of related talk therapies are commonly studied.

In the last years of Dr. Beck's life, he applied his cognitive techniques to the groups of people society typically forgets and disposes of, such as down and out drug addicts, alcoholics and people suffering from the late-stages schizophrenia. 

In a 2009 interview, Dr. Beck was asked about the help he was known to extend to these seemingly social outcasts. 

This is what Beck told The Times interviewer Bala Cynwyd:

"These people have some capacity to do better, but they have all these defeatist attitudes and expectations; they assume they're going to fail,"

During his lifetime, Beck authored or co-authored numerous books, but one of the most notable ones is the classic 1967 book, Depression: Causes and Treatment.

Final Thoughts

With so many pressing problems in the world today, we can rest assured that the topic of mental health and how to treat it will continue to be in the news.

We can be grateful for innovative thinkers like Dr. Aaron Beck, not only in the field of psychiatry, but all other areas and related fields.

It is free thinkers like this, who allow us to grow and come up with new ways to approach old problems, such as the ones related to mental health.

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