Rating: 
Summary: A good introduction to cognitive therapy
Review: This is a good introduction to cognitive therapy. Dr. Burns offers many practical techniques to help you lift yourself out of a depression, to reduce your anxiety and to communicate well. Overall an excellent book for learning clear thinking methods. However, I disagree with the author on some of his underlying premises and I don't recommend his subsequent books.
Rating:
Summary: Good but long
Review: This is an excellent book describing cognitive based techniques for dealing with thoughts and affects. In english, this book helps you to see how thoughts, emotions, and behavior all interact with one another for better or worse.This is a good text, but its also 2 inches thick. You have to be commmitted to reading this to get the real gems from it. But yes, it is worth the read.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredibly Helpful!
Review: This older (1990) edition is exactly the same as the 1999 edition but without the expanded section on the newer psychiatric drugs.
The wonderful thing about this book is that it's a workbook. Reading about how to stop being anxious or depressed is all very nice, but it's not going to help unless you put the theory and ideas into practice. In this book, Dr. Burns argues persuasively to convince you to actually practice the exercises he writes about and then walks you through them step by step.
Rating:
Summary: The most useful self help book I've ever read.
Review: Trying to overcome negative emotions and habits by thinking positive thoughts and applying advice given in many self-help books is like trying to solve the quadratic equation in your head. The thing that sets this book apart is that it gives you a step by step written procedure with which you discover, analyze and dispute the thoughts that make you feel bad. After doing the written exercise - the triple column technique, I found that the new rational thoughts attached themselves to the negative emotions I was trying to overcome. Later, when I re-experienced situations that could produce the same negative emotions, the new rational thoughts would bubble up to my consciousness and keep me from re-experiencing (or at least minimize) the negative emotion. This stuff is incredible!
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