Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is arguably the most successful therapy ever developed. In only about 40 years, it’s gone from the almost accidental innovations of two disenchanted psychoanalysts to the most widely practiced and promulgated approach in the world. For space aliens who’ve never heard of CBT, a quick and dirty definition may be in order. CBT—not a single model, but a constellation of short-term, pragmatic, goal-oriented clinical techniques, used in varying ways in different circumstances with people suffering from different conditions—is based on a simple axiom about human experience: how we think and perceive hugely influences how we feel. Independently coinvented by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, the clinical method rests on a kind of Socratic questioning (with lots of homework!), which helps clients identify and correct the inaccurate, defeatist assumptions and distorted thinking patterns that keep them stuck in a perpetual round of self-reinforcing unhappiness.

Taught in almost every clinical psychology and psychiatry program in the United States, CBT dominates the field in North America, much of Europe, and increasingly, Asia and Latin America. It’s essentially the “official” therapy of the healthcare arm of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which has in place a national staff-training program for treating depression—the largest such program in the country. Managed care and insurance companies love CBT for obvious reasons: it’s brief,…