Psychology-Suicide Final Project

Treatments for Anxiety Disorders.html

Treatments for Anxiety Disorders

Empirically supported treatments (ESTs) refer to those psychological treatments that substantial research evidence has found to be effective in reducing or eliminating mental health disorders. On the whole, there are more ESTs for anxiety disorders as compared to other disorders. In other words, we have effective treatments for most, if not all, anxiety disorders. However, it is often the case that clinicians—in their treatment of anxiety—use treatments that have not been empirically validated. An analogy would be a medical doctor using treatment techniques that have no research backing or a dentist using techniques that have not been proven effective through research. Keep in mind, this doesn't necessarily mean the treatments are inadequate; it simply means they haven't been the focus of research studies.

Research findings indicate that the following therapies are effective for anxiety:

• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (strong findings) for GAD
• Cognitive therapy and exposure and response prevention (strong findings) for OCD
• CBT (strong findings) and applied relaxation (modest findings) for panic disorder
• Exposure and cognitive processing (strong findings) for PTSD
• CBT (strong findings) for social phobia
• Exposure (strong findings) for simple phobia