Swimming Upstream: A Story about Becoming Human is a memoir divided into two parts. Part One is a personal story of the author’s toxic early developmental experiences and the subsequent effects of chronic depression, as well as the specific life experiences that enabled him to modify his early maladaptive history and mature. Part Two is a history and description of the author’s forty-seven-year career as an academic clinical psychologist and his research with chronic depression. His therapy model, The Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP), is the only treatment model designed specifically to treat the chronically depressed patient. CBASP has been personally used by the author to treat 450 chronically depressed patients; therefore, Swimming Upstream is essentially a story of a life trajectory of hope.

About the Author

James P. McCullough, Jr. is an eighty-three-year-old PhD clinical psychologist who has been married fifty-five years to Rosemary Fleming McCullough. He is currently an emeritus professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University after retiring in 2017 from teaching in two universities for forty-seven years on PhD clinical training faculties. In 2013 he and his colleagues succeeded in diagnostically disengaging chronic depression from episodic major depression in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Edition 5. The new chronic depression category is now known as Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia) or PDD. McCullough has also developed a therapy model to treat PDD, a model which has been empirically tested in the U.S. and in several European and Scandinavian countries. McCullough has conducted CBASP training workshops throughout the U.S. and in both the eastern and western hemispheres as well as written numerous research articles and several books: Treatment for Chronic Depression: CBASP; Skills Training Manual for Diagnosing and Treating Chronic Depression: CBASP; Patient’s Manual for CBASP; Treating Chronic Depression with Disciplined Personal Involvement: CBASP; CBASP as A Distinctive Treatment for Persistent Depressive Disorder: Distinctive Feature Series. He continues to see PDD patients and mentor psychotherapists.