Feeling good The new mood therapy

Another spin-off attempting to masquerade as ""new""--rooted, this time, in the insights of rational-emotive therapy and, less conclusively, in portions of behaviorism. Its basic premise, hammered in for 400-odd pages, is that our depressions result not from external circumstances but from our own negative thoughts about them--negative thoughts which are always ""gross distortions."" After painstakingly describing just how we wound ourselves with such thought disorders as ""all-or-nothing thinking"" and ""discounting the positive""--patterns which he strives to talk us out of--Burns (Center for Cognitive Therapy, Univ. of Pennsylvania) plods through an endless array of prescribed lists, evaluations, inventories to deal with everything from irritability to procrastination. Oh, yes, certain depressions are acceptable, as when a loved one dies (except that it's not really depression, it's sadness, unless of course we choose to get irrational about the whole thing); and Burns does have enough sense to refer suicidal readers to professionals for help. But the extravagant claim that cognitive therapy as outlined in this book is more effective than antidepressant drugs, and can effect a cure in as little as twelve weeks, is unsupported here: all the author is doing is trying to dissuade us from destructive attitudes. If that alone could alter severe unhappiness, depression would have been cured long ago. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.