Covid-19 has not only cost five million lives worldwide but also caused immense psychological damage. Researchers from Oxford University have found that people who contract the disease are at greater risk of developing psychiatric disorders. It is vital that health services have effective treatments available for depressive disorders and associated conditions such as anxiety. Professor Aaron Beck, an American psychiatrist who was a pioneer in this field, died on Monday aged 100. He was an under-sung hero of evidence-based medicine, whose work alleviated misery and saved lives.
Even before the pandemic, clinical depression was the predominant mental-health problem worldwide, with up to 300 million sufferers. This is not a “first-world problem” but a devastating psychiatric condition that, as happened after the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, is likely to rise in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.
Beck developed in the 1960s an approach to depression known as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Contrary to the popular stereotype of a patient reclining on a couch and giving free-form expression to their anxieties, CBT directly addresses the type of distorted thinking that causes depression. It enables a sufferer to break a cycle of depressive thinking and appreciate the world as it really is, with the possibility of hope and not only the certainty of suffering. And, as is recognised in the guidelines of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, it works.
Beck made “talking therapy” a science. As Professor Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in medicine, has put it: “He wrote a manual for the therapy, a cookbook, so that others could do studies as well.” Beck’s techniques, which owe much to the tradition of Socratic dialogue, have helped countless people who are afflicted with mental disorder escape from devastating illness. The world is in his debt.
