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David D. Burns earned his MD from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania, where he trained under Aaron Beck — the founder of cognitive therapy. He was among the first clinicians to test and refine cognitive behavioral techniques in controlled research settings, and his 1980 book Feeling Good translated that clinical science into a format accessible to the general public. For more than four decades it has been the book most frequently recommended by psychiatrists and psychologists to depressed patients in the United States and Canada.
Burns later developed TEAM CBT (Testing, Empathy, Agenda Setting, Methods), an evolution of standard CBT that he argues produces faster recovery by addressing the patient’s unconscious resistance to change before attempting symptom reduction. He has taught a free virtual psychotherapy training class at Stanford for 25 years, reaching over 50,000 mental health professionals. His Feeling Good Podcast, launched in 2016, has accumulated more than 9 million downloads and covers live therapy demonstrations, research updates, and reader questions.
His research has directly challenged the chemical imbalance theory of depression — the idea that low serotonin causes depression — and he has argued publicly that the evidence for this hypothesis is weaker than its widespread clinical adoption suggests. That position, once heterodox, has gained significant traction in the psychiatric literature over the past decade.
