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Burns received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1964 and his M.D. from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1970. He completed his residency training in psychiatry in 1974 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and was certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1976. Burns is the author of numerous research studies, book chapters and books. He also gives lectures and conducts many psychotherapy training workshops for mental health professionals throughout the United States and Canada each year. He has won many awards for his research and teaching, and has been named "Teacher of the Year" three times by the graduating class of psychiatric residents at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

His best-known book, The New Mood Therapy, has sold over four million copies in the United States alone, and has also been published in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia and many other countries. It was named one of the top ten behavioral science books of 1980 by the journal Behavioral Medicine, while according to The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books (New York: Guilford Press, 1994) it is the book most frequently recommended for depressed patients by mental health professionals in the United States. It was also rated the top self-help book for depressed individuals, based on a national survey of more than 500 mental health professionals’ evaluations of 1,000 self-help books. Burns's The Feeling Good Handbook was rated #2 in the survey.

Feeling Good has been studied in its use in self-directed bibliotherapy for depression. One study of older adults with mild to moderate depression found that reading this book, with brief intermittent phone check-in sessions, was an effective treatment for depression.

Feeling Good grew out of dissatisfaction with conventional Freudian treatment of depression. Burns’s mentor, Dr. Aaron T. Beck (considered the "father" of cognitive therapy; Dr. Albert Ellis is considered the "grandfather"), concluded that there was no empirical evidence for the success of Freudian psychoanalysis in treating depressed people. The idea that negative feelings such as depression and anxiety are triggered by our thoughts or perceptions has a long history, dating back to the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who said that people are disturbed not by things but by the way we think about them. In the 20th century, perhaps the first physician to apply this model to mental-health problems was Dr. Abraham Low, who founded Recovery Incorporated, a popular self-help movement still active today throughout the United States.

Burns is on the voluntary faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is actively involved in research and training. He also serves as a statistical consultant for Stanford's new Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. He has also served as Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Medical School and Acting Chief of Psychiatry at the Presbyterian / University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia.

The BDC is a 25-question rating scale for depression developed by David D. Burns. Each question is answered in the context of "during the past week, including today" and on a scale of 0 to 4, with 0 being "not at all" and 4 being "extremely".