Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Kirstie Reed. On the 1st of November 2021, the American psychiatrist Aaron T Beck

died at the age of 100. He was instrumental in the

development of what is now one of the most widely used treatments for anxiety and

depression in the world, CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy.

I've been speaking to Professor David Clark, who was a driving force in the rollout of CBT as a treatment within Britain's National Health Service.

But first, Aaron T Beck himself, speaking to the BBC in 1997.

What we try to do in cognitive therapy is to get the person to look at the gloomy

unrealistic thinking that they have and to examine their problems as far as

their gloomy thinking is concerned we try to get them to evaluate it and see if

it's accurate and if it's inaccurate then to help them to correct it.

When Aaron T-beck first developed what he called cognitive therapy,

it went against many traditional ideas of psychotherapy.

Think of a Freudian psycho analyst encouraging a patient on a couch to

search back through past traumas for the cause of their depression.

Well I think particularly when you're dealing with depressed people you have to be

upbeat and one of the problems is that many therapists actually get sucked into the

...