Mind Over Misery
A profile of psychiatrist David Burns, who wrote Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, “one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written” that has helped transform the field of psychiatry:
“Equally surprising: Burns tells the therapists he wants them to fail. Time and again. They can afford to do this because—unlike when he was a psychiatric resident in the 1970s and not one of his patients improved appreciably over an entire year—he now has 50 techniques they can try to cause ‘dramatic change’ in patients. ‘Right away. Not in five or six years.’ Burns wants them to fail at technique after technique until they find the ones that work for each patient.
“To some of the therapists, it sounds too good to be true. Burns reassures them that the techniques he’s about to teach, once dismissed by the mainstream, are becoming the mainstream.
“I know what he says is true. I’ve read his books and used his methods and have experienced the relief of having my own acute depression evaporate in an instant.”
