Judith S. Beck, PhD
July 1, 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of Beck Institute, and today I’m reflecting what we’ve accomplished so far, and what’s to come. When my father, Dr. Aaron T. Beck and I decided to co-found Beck Institute more than three decades ago, we hoped to fill a need for a freestanding nonprofit organization that could disseminate CBT and support and proliferate its growth regionally, nationally, and internationally.
When we first began, our training programs operated on-site in our office in suburban Philadelphia and consisted primarily of small cohorts of therapists who would attend workshops, watch therapy sessions conducted by my father, and study together in our library. In fact, it wasn’t until around ten years ago that we began to leverage the arrival of online training to provide on-demand courses and live virtual workshops that reach clinicians—and other professionals in helping roles—all around the world. Today we fulfill our mission of improving lives worldwide through excellence and innovation in Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Recovery-Oriented Cognitive Therapy through the development and delivery of innovative training programs for individuals and organizations. To date we have trained over 45,000 individuals in 130 countries!
I’m excited about our current activities and the lasting impact I expect them to have on the field of CBT and on mental health treatment in general. Here are some of our recent accomplishments:
- We have expanded our presence internationally by translating our popular on-demand courses into Arabic and Japanese. We have conducted training for important groups in Greece, Jordan, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Singapore, and Nigeria. And with the help of our accomplished International Advisory Committee, we have created and distributed content for our global community, offering free downloadable CBT resources in a wide range of languages.
- We recently expanded our rigorous CBT certification program to include the designation of CBT Certified Master Clinician—and we plan to launch a third level of certification for CBT supervisors. This important program has helped clinicians deliver CBT with fidelity to the model that has been scientifically tested, improving outcomes for clients and positively impacting their families and communities.
- We recently launched our Group Supervision program to make CBT supervision more accessible. Research shows that clinical supervision is a critical component of learning CBT, but unfortunately the cost of this intensive learning experience can be prohibitive. By providing supervision to small groups of clinicians, we are now able to extend the benefits of supervision to clinicians who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford it.
- We have expanded our training offerings for staff and helping professionals in non-traditional roles via our Training for Organizations program. We have delivered live in-person and web-based training programs that have helped teachers, HR professionals, parole and probation officers, and peer specialists deliver CBT and Recovery-Oriented Cognitive Therapy (CT-R) to individuals in a wide range of settings.
These are just a few of the important initiatives we are working on, but there are so many others!
What’s next for Beck Institute? We will continue to learn how CBT can be adapted for clients of different cultures, backgrounds, and lived experiences and integrate these important adaptations into all of our programming. We will add to and refine our course offerings to meet the needs of professionals and paraprofessionals and the individuals they serve. There is an unmet need for mental health services and resources related to youth, trauma, suicide, substance use (including opioid use), and forensics and we hope to play a role in addressing this critical need. We will continue to support the implementation of novel systems of delivery, bringing evidence-based CBT treatment to new populations and settings. And finally, we hope to encourage research into new technology like AI and mental health apps and learn how they can support and augment CBT treatment and training.
The future of CBT is bright, and we are proud to be on the front lines providing treatment, training, and resources where they are needed most. As always, I am so grateful to our dedicated staff and accomplished Board of Directors, who continue to make all of this work possible.