Existential Concerns and Cognitive-Behavioral Procedures

Clients enter therapy grappling with a range of difficulties. They don’t speak in diagnostic terms, but instead focus on the everyday problems that confront them. Their struggles may include isolation, loneliness, anxiety, guilt and regret, and problems making decisions in a world that offers seemingly endless choice. In contrast, the cognitive-behavior therapist is trained in the language of conditioning and extinction, avoidance and safety behaviors, behavioral activation and attentional biases. This book explores the ideas of the existentialist philosophers as a bridge between the suffering client and technically trained clinician. The volume is not a rejection of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), but seeks to place CBT in the broader context of the most popular philosophic tradition of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

Therapists versed in existentialism argue that the individual's starting point is characterized by a sense of disorientation in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Each individual must become solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and authentically. Each of us must confront the ‘Big 5’ existential issues of death, isolation, identity, freedom and meaning and find our solutions to these problems. 

The present volume explores each of these existential themes in turn. Each section opens with a theoretical chapter describing the relevant existential dilemma and its impact on human experience. The second chapter in each section explores its relationship to mental health disorders and psychopathology. The third chapter in each section explores the evidence for treating the existential issue from a CBT framework. This book will be of value to those interested in CBT, philosophy and mental health, and will appeal to psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.

Ross Menzies completed his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees in psychology at the University of NSW. He is currently Professor of Psychology in the Graduate School of Health, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In 1991, he was appointed founding Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the University of Sydney, a post which he held for over 20 years.  He is the past NSW President, and twice National President, of the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (AACBT). He is the previous editor of Australia's national CBT journal, Behaviour Change, and has trained psychologists, psychiatrists and allied health workers in CBT around the globe. Professor Menzies is an active researcher with nearly three decades of continuous funding from national competitive sources. He currently holds over $AUS7 million in research funding. He has produced 10 books and more than 200 journal papers and book chapters and was the President and Convenor of the 8th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (WCBCT) in Melbourne in 2016. He has recently been appointed a founding director and Treasurer of the newly formed World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies (WCCBT). Ross lives with his wife and three youngest children in the inner west of Sydney.

Rachel Menzies is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, where she completed her honours, masters and doctoral degrees in psychology. She published her first paper on death fears in Clinical Psychology Review as an undergraduate student, and followed this by convening a symposium on the topic at the 8th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies in Melbourne in 2016. Her experimental work on fear of death and psychopathology has been published in several leading journals, and she can regularly be heard on national and international radio, popular podcasts and at relevant public events (e.g. The Festival of Death and Dying, Adelaide Writers Week). In 2017, she gave her first invited plenary address on death anxiety, and an invited workshop, at the 47th Congress of the European Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (EABCT). Since then, she has published five books on existential issues and completed an invited workshop tour on the dread of death across seven cities for the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (AACBT). In 2021, she won the national PhD Prize from the Australian Psychological Society for her work of death anxiety and its relationship with mental health. Rachel lives with her husband and runs a private practice in the inner city of Sydney.

Genevieve Dingle is an Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology Programs at the University of Queensland with a research interest in how groups and communities can influence mental health and wellbeing. This includes both formal groups (such as cognitive behaviour therapy groups, and therapeutic communities for alcohol and other drug treatment), as well as arts-based groups such as choirs and creative writing groups. Genevieve worked for over a decade as a clinical psychologist in hospitals and private practice. She is the Editor of the journal Behaviour Change and serves on the executive of the Australian Music and Psychology Society and the Arts Health Network (QLD), and convenes the interdisciplinary UQ Music, Dance & Health research group. She is one of five authors of Routledge’s text, The New Psychology of Health - Unlocking the Social Cure, that was awarded the British Psychological Society Book of the Year Award in 2020. Genevieve lives in Brisbane with her husband and two daughters.