Padesky and Mooney's four-step Strengths-Based cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) model is designed to help clients build positive qualities. This article shows how it can be used to build and strengthen personal resilience. A structured search for client strengths is central to the approach, and methods designed to bring hidden strengths into client awareness are demonstrated through therapist-client dialogues. Development of positive qualities requires a shift in therapy perspective and different therapy methods from those employed when therapy is designed to ameliorate distress. Required adjustments to classic CBT are highlighted with specific recommendations for clinical modifications designed to support client development of resilience such as a focus on current strengths, the constructive use of imagery and client-generated metaphors. Although the focus of this article is on resilience, this Strengths-Based CBT model offers a template that also can be used to develop other positive human qualities. Copyright © 2012 Christine A. Padesky Key Practitioner Message:• A four-step strengths-based cognitive-behavioral therapy approach is presented.• Therapists help clients identify existing strengths that are used to construct a personal model of resilience.• Client-generated imagery and metaphors are particularly potent to help the client remember and creatively employ new positive qualities.• Behavioral experiments are designed in which the goal is to stay resilient rather than to achieve problem resolution.• Therapists are encouraged to use constructive therapy methods and interview practices including increased use of smiling and silence.

Schemas are core beliefs which cognitive therapists hypothesize play a central role in the maintenance of long‐term psychiatric problems. Clinical methods are described which can be used with clients to weaken maladaptive schemas and construct new, more adaptive schemas. Guidelines are presented for identifying maladaptive and alternative, more adaptive schemas. Case examples illustrate the use of continuum methods, positive data logs, historical tests of schema, psychodrama, and core belief worksheets to change schemas. Specification of therapeutic methods for changing schemas can lead to the development of treatment standards and protocols to measure the impact of schema change on chronic problems.

Although epidenniological data have documented sex differences in depression, the nature and origins of the differences are unclear. Depression in a large sample of young, unmarried college students was measured and described by the Beck Depression Inventory. No sex differences were found in the degree of depression experienced by these students, and yet, discriminant function analysis of the responses of the most depressed scorers yielded a significant and interpretable sex difference in the patterns of symptom expression. Depressed men were more likely to report an inability to cry, loss of social interest, a sense of failure, and somatic complaints. Women were characterized by indecisiveness and self-dislike. These patterns were not the same as sex role stereotyped responding in the total, predominantly nondepressed, sample. Speculations were made about the consequences of sex differences in depressive responses, including hypotheses about sex differences in experience with help-seeking and labeling.Sex differences in depression are widely acknowledged. In a report on the epidemiology of depression, Lehmann (1971) asserts, "It is well known that the female-to-male ratio is about 2:1 for depressive illness in Europe and North America" (p. 24). Weissman and Klerman (1977) thoroughly document sex differences in primary affective disorders, and in her monograph on the epidemiology of depression, Silverman (1968) concludes:There appear to be no exceptions to the generalization that depression is more common in females than males, whether it is the feeling of depression, neurotic depression or depressive psychosis, (p. 74)In actuality, the phenomenon appears to be far more complex than the conclusions are uniform. It is unclear whether women are in fact more depressed than men, or whether male and female experiences with depression differ in ways that lead women to express symptoms, cope with, seek help, or receiveThe authors are greatly indebted to Lew Bank,

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